It’s White-on-Black to Me

Because I love black-and-white photographs, I abruptly halted when I saw such a print at the EFI Vutek booth at ISA’s Sign Expo ’10. I was meeting with Jane Cedrone, EFI Vutek’s public relations and advertising manager and, sidetracked, said the print would easily compete with those produced by photo-industry printers. I soon learned EFI had created the dynamic image by printing white ink, only, on black media.

The white-on-black image was comparable to the 1940s movie-star photographs. In the day, photographers shot such images with Kodak Tri-X, a grainy, high-speed, high-contrast film whose unique qualities, blended with both soft and high-contrast lighting, created dramatic effects.
Today, Annie Leibovitz and other photographers use such techniques for Gucci-type ads in glamour magazines.

Artist Stacy Keenan, EFI Vutek’s application specialist, prepped the show image for printing. She said the company printed it on EFI Vutek’s QS3200, flatbed, UV-cure printer, using EFI’s white ink on black media. She reworked the image as a negative, to print as a white-on-black positive.
EFI Vutek’s 1080-dpi QS3200 can print three, white-ink layers, on top of each other, in one pass; further, it will print six, white-ink variations: overprint, underprint, spot, underspot, fill and overspot.

EFI Vutek’s white-ink, file-preparation paper says, “The Spot White mode can be used to print an image, text or shape entirely with white ink.” The paper recommends you build the white-ink file in the same program you’d use for the final document, such as Photoshop or Corel, but remember, this isn’t a black-and-white conversion — it’s a spot-color print.

Under Photoshop’s palette menu, find Create a New Spot Channel and paste your image into the White Ink block. Next, delete each CMYK and RGB channel, to obtain the one-color (spot) image. Finally, set the background color to white (which becomes clear in the final, on-black print) and save the file.

Because such a print requires strong (opaque) whites, I suggest you experiment prior to committing your final image. For example, try adjusting the negative’s image levels — or black point — to strengthen the white when you print the positive.

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