Ebony and Ivory

Epson's introduction of white ink may mean that Stevie Wonder's song 'Ebony and Ivory' can soon be sung about giclée inks. News of the new ink was recently released and I had a chance to talk about it with Robert Simpson, Epson's Western Regional Field Engineer, at the NW Photo Festival.

Painters using oils and acrylics have long enjoyed the luxury of blending white with colors to create pastels and highlights. Watercolorists and giclée printers are segregated from that option because there is no such thing as white ink for them. Instead, they depend on the color of the substrate for their white point.

How a picture is perceived depends on many things of course but the white and black points are two important ones as they establish the extreme ends of the dynamic tone range. It is easy to understand that a picture will look different printed on yellow or pink paper than it would on white. That is exactly what happens when you use different types of paper to print your giclées. The substrates available for giclée printing come in a range of 'white' shades. Some are more white than others. The ones that are especially white are actually light blue. I'm old enough to remember when Mom put 'bluing' in the wash to make Dad's white shirts whiter.

Deciding which shade of white makes a picture look best is a very personal matter. For artists and photographers the salient issue is that prepress will be required for each specific media to make the picture look 'right'. My book, Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée explains all this in great detail (www.gicleeprepress.com).

The white ink introduced by Epson is for flexography and gravure printing which are a very specialized types of printing that generally use solvent-based (non-aqueous) inks to print on the kinds of foils and films that are used in packaging (chips bags and the like). Using an Epson WT7900 packaging proofs can be easily made to work out designs and colors inexpensively in an office environment instead of on an enormous production printing press.


According to Epson the new ink is designed specifically for proofing flexographic and gravure print jobs that require the color white. Also required is the new Epson Stylus Pro WT7900 (above) which incorporates the breakthrough Epson UltraChrome™ HDR White Ink. The ink uses 'Organic Hollow Resin Particle Technology', which forces light to randomly scatter, producing the illusion of seeing the color white. Importantly, it is an aqueous ink containing no known carcinogens.

As a professional giclée printer I look forward to the day when the flexographic inks will be come generally available throughout the Epson giclée printing machine range. What that will do for us is provide even greater color management and an even wider dynamic tone range. The result will further improve on a printing process that already provides more colors and details than any other. That is what I like about Epson, they are never satisfied and continually push to improve giclée image quality. That is the same as our philosophy at Vashon Island Imaging, my fine-arts printing and publishing company (www.vashonislandimaging.com).

Many of our customers at Vashon Island Imaging art artists like 'natural' papers. One problem with the color of natural paper is that it is beige not white. The paper itself is fab but snow scenes look awful on it. With white ink that would no longer be a problem. In fact, if my hunch is right, white ink would essentially mean that a picture's color could be more consistently achieved on any media substrate. For my own illustration work I think it will be sensational to be able to print colors that are lighter than the substrates. My work relies on strong colors and looks best on very white media (you can see examples in the Fine Arts section of www.mesney.com). The need for bright white has limited the range of stocks that I can use. My favorite is Epson's Enhanced Matte which is a super-bright, super-white paper. It has a high cotton fiber content so that it glows under ultraviolet (UV) 'black' light... a feature I use to make moonlight magic in night scenes.

Providing control of white as well as black Epson technology will fully 'integrate' the dynamic tone range of giclée printing when that capability becomes available in the hopefully near future.