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Home >> Photography >> Digital Photography Fine
Art Digital Matte Papers The digital age is an interesting time. For some traditionalists, digital has been a threat to the ways they know best to do photography, while others have adopted digital with great gusto and continued the photographic journey into uncharted territory. Digital has at times been a great equalizer because it has placed more photographic tools into more consumers’ hands than film cameras ever did. At an equal level with the tools has been the software to ease the transition into photography. My wife remarked recently that I was foolish to try my hand at doing wedding photography as a business because digital has made “everyone” into photographers. True, that digital is everywhere, but not so true is that digital can place vision and experience into the hands of the neophyte photographer. No matter the tool, it still takes time to develop (pun intended) as a photographer. However, it is true that we are seeing more and more relatively new photographers offer up their services and more and more photographers offer prints for sale via the Internet, signifying their prints as “fine art.” Now I’m not of those fine art print selling photographers (as of yet), but I’ve been curious about what kinds of papers I should use if I were to eventually sell prints – I hesitate to call them “fine art” J My own personal taste for photographic prints generally favors a semi gloss, luster, or pearl finish to the papers. The light, pebbly texture that still shines a bit like glossy prints, but still looks like a “photograph” when compared to matte papers. However, in reading over what other photographers use for their print sales, you generally only find reference to matte papers instead of glossy or semi gloss finishes. Why is this so? The main reason likely has to do with longevity. Good archival quality papers are made from 100-percent cotton rag and this mostly means a matte finish – a finish that has no shine to it when viewed at angles and while not as saturated and brilliant as glossy papers, has an understated elegance to it. When you sell your prints, you are also selling your reputation as a photographer and you want to ensure that your photographs last for a very long time. This has been my primary reason for not being interested in print sales until now, because the printer I used for several years, the Epson 1270, is not an archival printer. On the contrary, the 1270 has been the whipping boy for many concerned with ozone contamination and prematurely fading prints. Not the kind of things you want your reputation to be based on. The latest Epson K3 Ultrachrome pigment ink printers have improved upon on those past problems dramatically and with a tip of the hat to Epson, HP and Canon, Epson’s primary competitors in the inkjet printer market, have both recently announced their own pigment ink printers. Now, with all three companies, digital darkroom printers can be reassured that their prints will last for many decades into the future. Even glossy prints can last for many decades with 70-80 years being the norm, but for truly archival life spans with some claims of into the centuries, we still need to use matte papers. As with glossy papers, there are plenty of choices on the market – a plethora of choices actually and it would take some time and money to try all the major samples to find out which papers suit you and your images the best. Thanks
to the kind generosity of Crane, Legion, and
In looking over the samplings, most of the matte papers can be separated into different categories. First is the weight, with the heavyweight papers weighing in at 300 gsm and the ligher papers coming in at under 200 gsm. When a woman says size doesn’t matter, she’s lying J And right away, for me, weight matters for paper with the heavier and thicker papers to my liking (this is beginning to read like a NC-17 rated article). Again, it comes down to reputation – if I’m going to sell my prints then I want my photos to be printed on the thickest and heaviest paper. It’s not to say that the lighter papers aren’t good, some are quite good, but there’s nothing like holding a thick matte paper in your hands and then letting the eyes engage the photo. There’s also a practical consideration to choosing heavy weight papers. Some printers can lay out a fair bit of ink and using thinner and light papers, the prints can come out feeling a bit soggy with some buckling of the printed area seen. Unfortunately, soggy, buckled prints tend to dry that way and it just does not lend itself to a feeling of quality. After figuring out the weight of the paper, you need to decide on whether you want a smooth or textured finish for the print. Prior to doing my tests for this article, if you had asked me whether I preferred smooth or textured, I’d have shrugged my shoulders and said it didn’t matter. I was wrong and it does matter, but it also depends on the photograph itself to determine the finish. Using smooth finished papers would be the safest thing to do as smooth papers work well with just about any image. I found that textured papers require an image with lots of detail otherwise in an image with very smooth tonalities and little detail, like one of my test photos used, you’re not so much looking at a photo, but the textured paper in relief. Textures can be subtle or very obvious, as in a canvas-like finish. Next up in the criteria of paper characteristics is bright or natural finish. While pretty much all good cotton rag papers will last a lifetime, using natural colored papers will push that lifetime even longer. Papers with a natural finish do not have brighteners added in during manufacturing – some brighteners use fluorescents, which is also not good for archival quality. But, some natural colored papers end up being too yellow for their own good. I would expect a bright white paper to eventually fade to yellow over many years, but I’m not so sure I want a paper already that color right away. So, there you have your primary factors in choosing a fine art matte paper:
There are, however, exceptions to the rule with some special finish papers that need their own introduction. While there are matte papers that mimic a canvas finish, you can buy and print on actual canvas material. Legion sent me some of their Premium Canvas and I hesitate to call it a paper, because it’s more or less a piece of cloth. It also ended up being the most difficult to print on as the soft material required careful pushing in through the Epson R2400’s front load feeder – using the regular sheet and manual single sheet feeder at the back did not work as the printer’s rollers couldn’t grasp the canvas material properly. The canvas also suffered from bleeding along the bottom edge of the print image and right now I won’t hazard a guess as to which is at fault, the canvas or the printer, but suffice to say that I don’t think I’ll be printing on canvas too often despite its qualities with one of the test images.
Then there is Crane’s Museo Silver Rag. This paper was officially introduced at the 2006 PMA show, but beta samples were sent out and reports have already been posted on various websites. I received a beta sampler package and like most other users, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the paper. At first blush, if you had handed me the paper without telling me anything about it I would have remarked on the curl first then the nice heavy weight and feel. Then upon inspecting the surface texture, I would have remarked that it has a mild semi gloss surface. If you told me that it was a 100-percent cotton rag matte paper I would have laughed at you until I flipped the paper over and felt the traditional matte paper. So, it’s like a thick matte paper with a semi gloss printing surface and one would assume, with the archival qualities of a good, thick matte paper. Unlike most matte papers, Silver Rag is meant to be used with Epson’s Photo Black ink and not the Matte Black ink. When I first heard that, I was thinking Silver Rag was the answer to my prayers – a matte paper that could effectively be used with Photo Black and avoid the costly cartridge swapping that Epson inflicts upon its K3 Ultrachrome users. However, I’m inclined to call Silver Rag a great semi gloss paper rather than a matte paper and is it any wonder that Crane suggests using the Epson Premium Semi Gloss paper setting in the driver settings. It’s still a great paper no matter how you categorize it and those that know much better than I, have waxed enthusiastically about Silver Rag being a match for traditional fiber-based prints from the chemical darkroom. Testing The
color
The color shot of the mountain skyline is largely devoid of fine detail, it’s primarily just delicate tones and transitions. The B&W of the old boat is a somewhat busy photo with the way the shot has been cropped with lots of details. I used Epson Enhanced Matte and Epson Velvet Fine Art papers as my base reference to compare all the papers to. Lighter weight papers were primarily compared to Enhanced Matte and heavier papers were compared to Velvet Fine Art. You’ll find that some of the comments are the same for papers within the same group or family. While the majority of papers surveyed here are matte type, the samples I received also included some glossy and semi gloss papers, so I’ve included comments on them too and compared them to similar Epson papers. In total, over 50 test prints were made from all the samples I received. I did not bother creating any custom profiles for the papers (I used ones available from the paper companies), as I did not have enough individual sample sheets to do so.
Technical, Nitpicky and Anal-Retentive Comments Crane Museo Silver Rag
Legion Arches Infinity White Smooth and White Textured (230 gsm)
Legion Digital Rag
Legion Photo Canvas Cover
Legion Photo Matte
Legion Premium Canvas
Legion
Legion
Moab Entrada Natural and Bright White (190 gsm papers)
Moab Entrada Natural and Bright White (300 gsm papers)
Aesthetic
Comments after I Power Slammed the Technician
Out of the Way After staring, viewing and angling the test prints from every which way from mere inches from my eyes, it was time to step back from the clinical review and just take a measure of the prints as photographs. Herein are my comments from viewing all of the test prints in indirect daylight inside my home office with the prints about arms length distance away.
Mountain Skyline
Yosemite
B&W Nude
B&W Boat
Conclusion If Epson Velvet were a little bit heavier then it could be the perfect matte paper; however, heavier weight can sometimes be too much of a good thing and come with a cost in increased texture and inability to retain deep tonality, so perhaps Epson Velvet already encompasses the right mix of compromises as it is. What I have also found with matte papers is that they really work best with B&W images. Images that have a lot of continuous tone require a little more care in paper choice with the smooth papers better suited for these types of images. It’s too bad that I didn’t receive any Hahnemuhle samples, as the one print that I purchased printed on this paper indicates that Photo Rag could be the perfect matte paper thanks to it heavy weight, smoothness and ability to hold deep black. I’ll probably have to buy my own samples to test with and report back about that experience. Another article on (glossy) inkjet papers May 9, 2006 - I finally got my order of Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, 308 gsm, smooth surface, fine art inkjet paper. Just in time as my review loan period is coming due for the X-Rite suite, as well as giving me fodder for the GretagMacbeth under trial right now (and the ColorVision one too). The paper is quick thick and should be fed through the manual roll feeder of Epson desktop printers. It has a texture not unsimilar to Epson Velvet, but Velvet is just a bit more fine in its "teeth." Velvet is also a little bit brighter than Photo Rag, but not quite as thick and heavy. Unlike the profiles supplied by other paper brands, Hahnemuhle's profile for the Epson R2400 doesn't suck, but I detect a slight coolness in comparison to Velvet printed with Epson's Special profile. I expect that a custom profile will remedy this coolness. As I expected, I like Photo Rag 308 quite a lot and it would be a toss up between it and Epson Velvet for future matte printing needs. |
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