So here I am sitting at my workstation when I glance up at the triptych I’ve had on the wall in front of me for as long as I can remember. It’s a set I took of Carla, posing in the Aberdeen studio back in 2014, and I suspect printed and mounted not too long afterwards. It has certainly been up there since 2018 as they were part of my first exhibition around that time, and looking at their crookedness, I clearly rehung them in a hurry afterwards!
I’ve always loved this set. The central portrait of Carla has a lovely symmetry to it, and the geometric shapes she presents in the two flanking images really enhance her presence and support the central portrait. But today, something in these pictures is tugging at me – something I hadn’t noticed before. A tiny imbalance, a loose thread my engineering brain can’t resist giving a gentle pull. And as I do, the whole triptych seems to shift ever so slightly off‑kilter. Curiouser and curiouser.
And as I sit there, letting my eyes wonder across the three frames, the problem materialises in front of me with a grin. It isn’t in Carla’s pose, or the geometry, or the way the set hangs on the wall. It’s inside the prints themselves. The left two have taken on a faint, almost imperceptible colour shift – a coolness, a greenish lean that I’ve somehow managed to ignore for years. The third, by contrast, sits in a calmer, more neutral space, as if it belongs to a different family altogether.
Once I see it, I can’t unsee it. I’m certain they were a matched set when I printed them, otherwise I wouldn’t have hung them this way. Something chemical is happening here, and that loose thread I tugged on is beginning to unravel into a much bigger question: why do these prints, made from the same session, on the same printer & paper, look so fundamentally different?
The answer can ONLY lie in a process hiccup. Something I did differently for one image, than I did for the other two – at the time of printing – and THAT must relate to the inks used in the printer to achieve the neutral monochrome look. If the files were the same, the paper was the same, the printer was the same, and the prints were made as a set, then the only variable left is the printing path. One of these images must have gone through a different route – a different driver mode, a different ink mix, a different tonal engine – and that divergence is now written into the chemistry of the paper.
Which means the imbalance I’m seeing isn’t a mystery at all. It’s the fingerprint of two different monochrome processes, hanging side by side, subtly telling their stories in slightly different hues. And now that I’ve noticed it, the next question becomes obvious: what exactly did I do differently that day?
If the only variable left is the printing path, then the only meaningful difference between these prints must be the way the printer chose to build the monochrome tones. And that, in turn, comes down to one thing: whether I printed them using the colour managed workflow… or Epson’s Advanced Black & White driver.
Those two modes may look similar on screen, but under the hood they have completely different personalities. Colour managed monochrome uses the full inkset – cyan, magenta, yellow, light cyan, light magenta, together with the blacks and neutrals – all working together to construct a perceptually neutral greyscale. It’s a balancing act, a chemical negotiation between pigments that were never designed to be perfectly neutral in the first place. It can look good, even very good, but it’s inherently fragile. A tiny shift in lighting, paper tone, or pigment behaviour a decade down the road, and the balance tips.
ABW, on the other hand, is a black dominant engine. It leans heavily on Epson’s carbon rich MK ink, supported by the lighter LK and LLK shades, and only sprinkles in colour inks when necessary for intentional toning. It’s calmer. More stable. Less metameric. And when I look at the triptych now, it’s obvious which print came from which path. The ones with that faint greenish drift – were almost certainly printed through the colour managed workflow. The right image, the one that still sits in a clean, neutral space, must have come from ABW.
Three prints made side by side, but speaking in two different chemical languages. And after all these years, the difference has finally made itself known.
The more I think about it, the more obvious the mechanism becomes. Colour managed monochrome and ABW don’t just use different driver paths – they use fundamentally different ink chemistries to build the illusion of neutrality. And those chemistries age, settle, and reveal themselves in different ways.
Colour managed monochrome leans heavily on the colour inks – cyan, magenta, yellow, and their lighter variants – to construct a neutral tone. It’s a clever balancing act, but it’s still a balancing act. Each of those pigments has its own spectral fingerprint, its own metameric quirks, its own way of responding to light. When you ask them to behave as a single, unified grey, you’re essentially asking six different voices to sing in perfect harmony. They can do it, but the harmony is fragile. A slight shift in lighting, paper tone, or pigment behaviour, and the neutrality tilts. That faint greenish drift in the flanking prints. That’s the colour inks quietly waving to us.
ABW, by contrast, is built on a much steadier foundation. It relies primarily on Epson’s carbon rich MK ink, supported by the lighter LK and LLK shades. Carbon pigments have a smoother spectral response, lower metamerism, and a natural neutrality that doesn’t depend on chromatic balancing. They don’t need to negotiate with cyan or magenta to stay grey – they simply are grey. That’s why the rightmost image has held its ground all these years. It was printed with a black dominant engine, and black dominant engines just don’t drift in the same way.
So, the triptych on my wall isn’t just three images of Carla. It’s a Tale of Two Stories – One built from a potion of pigments trying their best to get on with each other, and one built from real carbon inks doing what carbon inks do naturally. And after a decade on the wall, the difference is really quite obvious.
Once you start thinking in terms of chemistry rather than calibration, the next piece of the puzzle becomes obvious: Epson didn’t stumble into this behaviour by accident. The whole K3 system – the trio of MK, LK, and LLK – exists precisely because a single black ink simply can’t carry a monochrome print on its own.
If you try to build an entire tonal range with just MK or PK, the printer has no choice but to lean heavily on the colour inks to fill in the gaps. Highlights get grainy, midtones start to dither, shadows block up, and neutrality becomes a precarious balancing act. You can make a monochrome print that way, but you can’t make a stable one. Not without help.
So, Epson did something rather brilliant: they added more black – literally. LK and LLK aren’t decorative extras; they’re structural supports. They allow the printer to build most of the tonal ramp using carbon rich pigments rather than chromatic (colour) ones. The lighter blacks handle the highlights and midtones with far less dithering, while MK anchors the shadows with depth and stability. The result is a smoother tonal gradient, lower metamerism, and a neutrality that doesn’t depend on cyan and magenta behaving themselves.
In other words, the K3 system is Epson’s own acknowledgement that monochrome printing is fundamentally a chemical problem. If you want stable greys, you need inks that are grey by nature, not by negotiation. And when you look at my triptych with that in mind, the story becomes even clearer: the two colour managed prints were built on a foundation of chromatic compromise, while the ABW print was built on carbon. One is a balancing act. The other is a resting state.
At this point, I had a choice to make. I could stay within the warm, safe confines of Epson’s K3 system – three excellent carbon blacks attached to a five colour engine that was never designed for pure monochrome. A fantastic compromise, yes. But still a compromise.
Or, if I want to elevate my monochrome prints to true archival quality, there are really only two rabbit holes worth diving into – both of which involve a leap of faith Through the Looking Glass. One labelled Eat Me – Silver, and the other Drink Me – Carbon, and I know full well that either will send me Mad as a Hatter!
