All our digital prints are produced on genuine HARMAN Black and White Silver Gelatin Photographic Paper. We believe this is as close as you can get to a traditional B&W darkroom print from a digital file and has significant benefits when compared to B&W images produced from colour processes;

• Prints have a consistent and neutral image tone (no colour cast).
• Strong blacks and detailed highlights.
• Bright white base for stunning black and white photographs.
• Superb quality and robustness.
• Excellent batch-to-batch and print-to-print consistency.
• No printing colour profiles required.
• With or without white borders.

Please note that there is a $5.00 minimum (excluding shipping) on all online print orders.

Order HARMAN Silver Gelatin Prints

 

 

Tutorial

There are many ways to produce your black and white digital files. The two most popular methods are;

1. Scanning black and white film or prints
2. Converting colour digital files

The main purpose of this tutorial is therefore to get the best results from our digital upload and printing service and you will find some useful recommendations below;

 

Monitor Calibration

We can supply a calibration print to check your monitior aganst output from our printer. Just include a note with your name and address here: Contact Us

Download the file below and compare aganst the calibration print that we send you.

 

 

HARMAN Lab recommends using a profiled monitor for preparing and viewing your black and white images. With a profiled set-up, we still recommend using a test print to fine tune your workflow. It is vital that what you see on your screen will closely match our output.

What if I don't have profiling equipment ?
Since we are only considering black and white files, it is still possible to achieve an excellent result even without expensive profiling equipment. Black and white is all about tonal range and contrast. By dialing in your monitor to match our test print and following some basic guidelines you will get great looking prints;

- Turn down the brightness and contrast levels (particularly on LCD monitors)
- Prepare your images on screen in a room with subtle lighting rather than bright light.
- Use a test print to assess on screen tonal range, contrast and black density.

 

Image Preparation

For our Self-Corrected Prints, we don't correct images. So it is important your images are optimised ready for printing. Modern LCD monitors are very high contrast and often make shadow areas appear blacker than they actually are. It is important to that check your files feature a full range of tones and that blacks really are 100% K despite how they appear on the screen. If your blacks are only 90% K your prints will look flat. Depending on the subject matter prints will also benefit from a degree of sharpening, particularly smaller format prints.
Our preferred file format is GREYSCALE JPEG.  Photoshop will normally default to the Grey Gamma 2.2 colourspace when working in Greyscale, which is fine for our service.
It is possible for us to print direct from colour files without any conversion, although this is NOT recommended as images are unlikely to be as well optimised as those properly converted to black and white first. Therefore, if you choose to upload colour files we cannot guarantee the quality of the images produced. If you submit colour images, they will be printed in black & white.

Preferred sizing is 300dpi @ output size, although we will make any sizing adjustments necessary.