It turns out that black inkjet pigment is not well suited to producing fine tonal gradations in most alternative photographic processes. The problem is the black is just too strong and the printer can’t generate enough different gray values in the narrow range required by the photopolymer plates. Imagine trying to render a figure with a Sharpie and you get the idea. Mark’s insight is that one can choose a mixture of much weaker color inks in order to produce a positive with densities that match the response curves of the plates. By using color inks, it is possible to create hundreds of distinct values across the entire range from white to black. This is a huge improvement over black inks which are so dense they can only create a handful of distinct values in the densities useful for plate making. The squares in the test strip above represent about 150 different color mixtures.The goal is to choose the mixture that just barely yields black. The goal is to choose the mixture that just barely yields black.