Black, White, or Gray?

The first thing we need to discuss is terminology. By convention, a "Black and White" photograph usually refers to a printing in many shades of gray. However, a "Black and White" laser printer usually refers to literally just black dots on white paper. So, in the interest of being consistent, we have used the follow terminology throughout the site:

• "Black and White" refers to a grayscale photograph in its popular, conventional form
• "Monochrome" refers to black and white text printing, like a laser printer or photocopy.

Unfortunately all of these could be legitimately reversed, and have the same meaning.

The Best Way to Make a Black and White Print

The best way to make a black and white print is to be sure all of your prints are in the "Grayscale" color space. The reason this is so important is that a color printer will not use a drop of color ink if the image is in Grayscale. However, if just one pixel is colored, then it will assume the whole image is colored, and use a combination of colors.

Convert Images to Grayscale

Many photo editing applications have the ability to easily convert images to grayscale, often by under the "Image -> Mode" menu.

You can also convert your images into grayscale easily on Viovio.

1. Upload your images to an image gallery, and select the "Image Order" icon when viewing the gallery.
2. Select the "Batch Select" checkbox next to the images you would like in greyscale (or batch select all at the bottom of the page)
3. Under the "Batch Commands" menu, choose "Convert to Grayscale" and select "SAVE CHANGES"

After a few minutes, all of your images will be converted to true gray.

What about the K in CMYK ?

Using CMYK is a really advanced. Almost always, colorless photos converted from RGB to CMYK use all colors (CMY) to create levels of black instead of just K. This is because RGB has all colors for it's black levels, and the CMY conversion is doing the exact same thing as RGB. Using the Grayscale colorspace removes all color information and uses just K.