Paper
Filed in Printing - papers - July 22, 2007I’ve looked at a lot of photographic inkjet paper in this last year. Or more specifically, I’ve looked at a lot of paper surfaces over the past year. Even ignoring Pictorico, which isn’t paper at all, the paper in an inkjet paper only plays a supporting role most of the time.
Er, so what? Well, the what is that a part of the skill of the paper makers is in making a paper coating that does all the necessary technical things, but isn’t in itself ugly. This probably isn’t an exhaustive list, but here is an entirely subjective guide to inkjet paper coatings:
1. The shiny plastic sort – not sure why any paper is involved at all in this style. At its best these surfaces make it look like a print is under water. At its worst they become highly reflective mirrors that hide the image.
2. Lustre papers – these are shiny papers that have been scrapped with sandpaper to try and reduce the reflections. Unfortunately this adds a textured surface to the paper that is nearly as distracting as the reflections were.
3. The fine art ‘fibre’ type – most of these seem like cardboard over which somebody has poured a thick and partly opaque jelly. The ink spreads into the jelly and wanders around a bit. The worst of these have a fake leather texture.
4. Heavy matte papers on cellulose, not cotton rag, bases – here the coating completely swamps the paper underlay. Often, a finger nail run along the paper’s edge can chip off the coating which turns out to be at least as thick at the paper layer. The surface texture can be pleasant, but it appears to be very difficult for the paper companies to create a consistent coating layer, and, of course, imperfections show up badly.
5. The fine art cotton type – the worst of these papers look like they have been freshly coated with thick wallpaper paste, with the fibres underneath being squashed and pushed in random directions. Some papers which avoid this look seem to be covered in irregular indentations (which are presumably hidden by the thicker coating on some papers).
There are good papers in each category, but the range of ways in which papers fail to be good is large. My personal favourites are all cotton papers in which the paper element isn’t swamped by the coating. I know that they are coated (it says so on the box), but they look and feel more like paper than do the others that I’ve tried.
Your taste may easily vary.
A nice curmudgeonly perspective. :-)
Color ink sprayed on matt surfaces looks flat and cartoony, not “photographic”, to my own jaundiced eye. And I can’t bring myself to spend $1.50-$2.00 per letter-size sheet to do my own tests on the jelly-papers. So for now the question comes down to whether shiny plastic or sandpapered plastic is less bad. At the moment I’m leaning toward the sandpaper, but that may yet change.
July 22, 2007 @ 4:09 pm
There are certainly a lot of horrendous papers on the market. Personally I can’t really come to grips with matte papers. To some extent they can look good under glass, but still I like the semi gloss look better for photographs. The matte papers make them look too graphical. I guess it is a result of learning the craft when there was only film and glossy papers around.
BTW. I have enjoyed your printing topics the last few months. I’ve been in a process of refining my own printing this summer as I dealing with a lab 1500 kilometers away was tiering. What I’ve learned the most is that pigment ink isn’t suited for all photographs, especially those requiring a lot of saturation.
July 23, 2007 @ 8:38 pm
Oren,
Well, I get called a curmudgeon from time to time…
July 24, 2007 @ 5:47 pm
Svein-Frode,
A lab which is 1500 metres away is difficult enough to manage. A lab 1500 kilometers away would be nigh on impossible.
Like you, I’m faced with long distance lab work, or diy.
July 24, 2007 @ 5:48 pm