I’ve said it before: printing black-and-white photographs at home is a dark art. Of course, printing B&W in a traditional “wet” darkroom takes years of learning and mistakes before you can count yourself among the elect.

What’s the best paper and inkset combination to use?

Which printer and color management settings yield the best results?

How do I get decent midtones from the Roark curves?

How permanent are the results?

I’m figuring out the answers . . . but slowly. The Internet is full of information — especially the forums on Photo.Net and the Digital Black and White Yahoo group. It’s unfortunate that an alarming amount of it is either incorrect or bullshit (the kind that comes from not really caring enough to look up the right answer or settling for almost good enough results).

But I’ll use this space as a research blog, which seems like the right way to both preserve the history of what I’m doing (to aid my own memory), invite helpful comments from people who have come down this path before, and hopefully aid others attempting to do the same thing by giving them honest opinions and hard facts. I’m basically opening up my print-making scrapbook, which was extremely helpful when I first wrestled with color management.