Steve,

Sorry I forgot, you’re a photographer!

I was thinking about this issue of not being able to print with white. What about doing the white with a silkscreen, then printing black on top of that?

I wouldn’t count on it. It’s not built into the way CMYK printing works, which involves using the white of the paper as the white. Perhaps you could tint your paper digitally, and use a layer mask to hold out the whites. Not quite the same, I know.

That’s beginning to sound like work! I can imagine, once I develop a technique, tinting a large number of sheets of paper quickly, and later printing on them in the usual, painless way. But creating screens and doing overprinting on each print seems much more time-consuming. I’m hoping a white ink becomes available for my printer before too long…

You could do this by screenprinting the light areas onto your digital prints.

I could adjust digital scans of the prints on tinted paper for display on a monitor, but on the physical print itself I have no way of increasing the light reflectivity of a printed region. If I had white pigment I could print with that to brighten the region, but all my normal pigments (for monochrome printing) only serve to darken to vearying degrees.