Image Science June 2006 Update

Hello

It's that time again - we've got lots of news, and interesting new things to try, and some more extensive thoughts on the new world of papers arriving on the market that are getting lots of press around the place - those that seek to mimic traditional fibre based papers.    The longer article is at the bottom as usual - we're carrying two of the three major new papers (and the third is actually not really the same sort of thing anyway), and have now done some extensive testing and profiling.  I hope you enjoy the article. 

Wedding Bells!

First - a personal note - after almost five years together, Amy and I have finally got engaged, and we'll be tying the proverbial on October 7th (which means early to mid October we may not be quite so speedy as normal - so if you're planning an exhibition around then, you might want to factor that in!).  Amy joined Image Science full time about three months ago but has been an invaluable part of the team (and my life) for much longer than that!

Eizo Monitors

By popular demand, we're now selling Eizo monitors.  These are the bees knees when it comes to monitors for digital image making, and while they're not as cheap as a bargain basement panel from a computer store, neither are they more expensive than other premium brands.  But they are better - they're sharp, very colour accurate, and very consistent.  A real pleasure to use - I've got a 21" model on my own desk which gets day in day out use and calibrates better than any other screen I've owned, including top of the line CRTs.  We're selling the monitors at Australia's best prices, we have extensive notes about calibration up on our site, and you're always welcome to give me a ring and discuss the finer points of setting up an environment for accurate and easy soft-proofing.  So, next time you're upgrading your screen have a think about an Eizo (or two!), because you won't spend any more than something like an Apple Cinema Display but you will get a much better panel. 

Eizo Monitors

Black and White ICC Profiles

We're now offering a new black and white ICC profiling service, specifically for those of you using specialist black and white processes that, until now, have not allowed soft proofing of the process.  It works just like colour profiling - print a test target using any repeatable black and white process you like (such as Quadtone RIP, or the new ABW Advanced Black and White mode in the Epson driver) and send us the target - we'll read it in using a spectrophotometer and produce the profile for you ($40).  This profile is then used in View->Proof Setup to see a very accurate an on-screen simulation of your final print BEFORE you use any ink and paper - very handy!  We've done this already for some Melbourne labs, as well as ourselves of course, and people are reporting that they're very happy, with very precise tonal placement now possible (and greater neutrality when making prints, if using an essentially colour process).

Image Science Black and White ICC Profile Service

Low Cost Monitor Calibrator - the Gretag Macbeth 'huey'

Gretag Macbeth have released a new, low-cost monitor calibration unit called the 'huey' - at just $139 it's great for those of you on a tight budget (eg students).  It's not as flexible as the Eye One Display V2, but still much better than no calibration at all, and does a great job on calibrating your colours.  It's *extremely* easy to use and great for 'set-and-forget' calibration.  Of course if you want more flexibility, especially in the area of luminosity control, the Eye One Display V2 is still the best way to go. 

Gretag Macbeth huey

Crane Museo Cards

If you're looking to make beautiful cards from your work, then Crane Museo cards are a lovely option.  They're printable at full quality on both sides, come in a variety of shapes and sizes, include matching envelopes, and there are downloadable templates to help you lay things out easily.  They're perfect for use in a variety of contexts - short run promotional material, cards for your loved ones, or invitations to your next party or exhibition!  Made with Museo 100% cotton rag paper, they're also very nicely scored, far nicer than can be achieved with a scoring implement or the old 'empty pen along a ruler' method. 

Of course we offer bulk pricing if you need a lot of them, just get in touch and we'll work something out for you.

Crane Museo Cards

Gretag Macbeth Colour Checker Charts

We're now carrying the Gretag Macbeth Colour Checker charts.  Made by Munsell laboratories, these things are made to a very high level of consistency.  Useful for copy work or any work where you need colour accuracy, you simply pop a chart into the frame somewhere (or a separate frame shot under the same lighting), shoot, and then match the RGB numbers in your raw processor/Photoshop (in the colour space of your choice).  There are a number of scripts available around the web to automate the process as well.  The classic ColourChecker includes a set of grey scale patches to help you quickly and easily achieve white balance and neutrality, as well as common tones like skin tones and foliage tones.  There's plenty of other charts available as well - for camera profiling or white balance, for example.

Gretag Macbeth Colour Checker Charts

Printable Silk

Many of you have asked - and now we can get printable silk.  It takes about three weeks to order it in, and it is not cheap (it's silk, after all!).  It prints surprisingly well (it's paper backed and will feed easily through a printer) and drapes just like silk should once you remove the backing.  We have samples available in very limited quantities if you're interested, so please get in touch if you would like to see some (we can even print a specific test image for you using our profiles here).

Hahnemuehle Fine Art Pearl

This is Hahnemuehle's impressive attempt to compete with Crane Silver Rag.  Lots more info about this below, but pricing is now available and we're taking expressions of interest - first stocks expected at the end of June.  If you want some, now is the time to get in line!

Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl

Jeremy's Corner - The New World of Inkjet Papers (FAP, CSR, and that Innova one)

As of about six months ago, the inkjet world finally and unequivocally surpassed the darkroom in pretty much all areas of print quality. Anyone still arguing otherwise is really taking a head in the sand position.  The inkjet world now offers pretty much every combination of surface, substrate and texture that you could possibly want - with a gamut and contrast range (the two key issues in perceived print quality) surpassing any traditional process, and offering far, far greater control with far less effort than was ever achievable in the relatively crude world of chemistry based printing.  The materials available - both inks and papers, have longevity ratings as good as, or exceeding, pretty much any other process on the planet today.  The inkjet is (currently) the ultimate image making tool and looks to stay that way for some time to come.  While inkjet processes will never be as cheap as chemistry based processes, their is still plenty of headroom for profitable image making and the extra cost brings with it unarguable benefits in control and image quality.

What we want from the ideal print is worth looking at - barring personal preference, without considering individual images, and considering all options, what we want from a print is:

• High contrast range (good blacks and good whites)
• Smooth colour gamut
• Wide colour gamut
• Neutrality in the greyscale
• Viewable from all angles without reflectivity issues 
• Longevity
• Sharpness

So the ideal print is one which is totally matte (therefore no reflectivity issues), offers a great neutral tonal scale (say from a bright white to a d-max of 2.2 or more), and is capable of expressing a very wide and smooth colour gamut.

Now, depending on the sort of images you make, some of this may well not be relevant - colour gamut is totally irrelevant to someone who exclusively works in black and white, but contrast range becomes correspondingly more important, of course.  Longevity may not be relevant to you if you cycle your folio images very rapidly.  You may just love gloss and not care about the reflectivity issues it raises.  All of these views are perfectly legitimate but when thinking about the ideal printing system, these are things we'd want to achieve with it.  And finally with inkjet printers, with good technique and using good materials, we can achieve ALL of these things across all sorts of media. 

As I said above, the two key things that affect visible print quality are colour gamut (both in terms of the size of the gamut, i.e the usable palette of the printing system, and in terms of smoothness within that gamut) and the available contrast range (the distance between maximum ink black and paper white).  These two factors are the key issues in visible print quality. 

In general terms, to improve these two aspects, we must make sacrifices.  Let's look at contrast range first.  In general, to increase the available contrast range, we sacrifice comfort in surface reflectivity to achieve deeper blacks - that is, as we increase the gloss level of a surface, we get deeper blacks - this gives us a fuller, richer, more three dimensional print.  But the price for this is issues of reflectivity (we can't look at the print from certain angles, we have to mount the image to something very very flat or we get weird wrinkles or orange peel effects, and behind glass we get all sorts of problems) and a (much more subjective) loss of beauty - high gloss simply isn't as beautiful to most people as matte.  And of course surface texture is only part of the story - perception of blacks (more so than whites) are also dramatically effected by lighting - under bright spot lights (the sort of light that exhibition spaces unfortunately often seem to use) matte blacks appear milky and weak, but under typical diffuse room lighting they look, if anything, blacker than gloss blacks.

To increase whites, papers are made with better materials (good but expensive) more thoroughly washed (also makes them more expensive), bleached (not good for a variety of reasons), or have optical brighteners added to them (chemical agents that make papers appear brighter - generally regarded as not good for archival purposes, see the bottom of this page for more on optical brighteners).  So to get better whites, we have to pay more, and/or suffer increased amounts of chemicals in our prints (with their sometimes unpredictable side effects).  But gain this is only a part of the story - the interesting thing about whites is that, with no other reference point in the same field of vision (like the same print on a different type of paper, or an image on a screen), our eye will accept the brightest point in any print without strong colouring as white, and the rest of our perception of that print will balance to that white.  So while bright, clinical, cool whites may be a nice idea in theory, if you're not holding a brighter reference point next to the print you're looking at, a super bright white just isn't that important.

Looking at colour gamut, the same general principles apply (and are related).  It's easier to achieve wider gamuts (i.e. more saturated colours) on glossier surfaces (particularly with dark, saturated colours) - again, we sacrifice some ease of viewing the print to achieve a punchier result.

The key invisible issues that effect the print are all to do with longevity - what is the paper substrate (with cotton being ideal, and wood pulp and plastic being commonly used alternatives), which fundamentally defines how long, as a physical thing, a print will survive before it degrades.  Cotton is used because the long fibres mean the substrate is much, much stronger than wood pulp, which has tiny, short, mashed up fibres.  The next most important thing is the coating  and its compatibility with the ink being applied to it - a very complex issue with no easy answers, requiring extensive independent testing to assess, but increasingly well understood by paper manufacturers.  To be fair most of the fine art paper manufacturers seem to be at a similar place with this right now (likely because they all get their coating chemistry from similar places!).  The final commonly considered point is optical brighteners - and in general, they shouldn't be there, because they will fade and your print will change appearance over time because of it - so ideally, bright whites without OBs is the best way to go, but some people simply don't like warm papers and are willing to accept OBs for the sake of brighter whites in the short term.

In the darkroom, the fibre based print has long been considered the King.  Fibre based prints offered the best of all worlds - cotton fibres, meaning a strong substrate.  Excellent black density through a semi-gloss surface with a classy but low key sheen.  Great, clinical, cool whites were available (although a little known secret is that most fibre based traditional papers had plenty of optical brightening agents in them!), as well as natural warm whites.  Until recently, there was no alternative in the inkjet world - no cotton based papers that offered a black depth approaching that of a traditional fibre based paper.

Recently, three papers have come on the market - Crane Silver Rag, Hahnemuehle Fine Art Pearl and Innova F-Type FibaPrint Gloss Ultra Smooth (how's that for a mouthful!).  I'll deal with the Innova paper first because it's the least interesting and it's kind of strange that the Innova paper is lumped in with the other two.  The Innova paper is a wood pulp based paper with a semi-gloss finish (and it's the glossiest of the three) - but the key thing is that it is a wood pulp based paper - meaning, it's basically like any other vanilla semi-gloss paper from any other manufacturer (e.g. Ilford Smooth Pearl).  But for some reason, a few well known web commentators have got over excited about it, assuming it is somehow like the other two papers (Innova have done a good marketing job!) - but really it's nothing like them, and nothing really new either.  We've decided against carrying it because it doesn't fit our range of quality 100% cotton fine art papers (also because Innova have had regular quality control issues in the past with their Fibaprint matte paper).

So the two that remain are really the more interesting papers because they're both 100% cotton rag papers - making them much tougher and more archival (and giving them a more attractive surface quality to boot).  They're the first of their kind, and a really exciting development because they're the first cotton papers to offer *really* deep blacks (d-max of 2.2 - 2.8 has been quoted, my own testing indicates 2.2 to 2.4 depending on ink density).  Hahne Photo Rag has incredible blacks for a matte paper (d-max about 1.7) and looks great under normal diffuse lighting.  But in the context of exhibition style direct spot lighting (actually a very uncommon scenario in the big scheme of things), the lower d-max begins to tell.  These new papers can stand up to very strong lighting and still offer incredibly deep blacks, with a very low amount of sheen as the price (the sheen is actually very attractive and a lot people think it is a bonus rather than a negative).  Once d-max goes above 2.2 or so, it almost becomes irrelevant and is really only an issue for densitometers, as the eye just registers a deep black beyond which no more black is relevant.  As an indication, I'm told Ansel Adam's traditional fibre based prints rarely get above a d-max of 2.0 - and he was notorious for strong, powerful printing with inky deep blacks (especially as a younger man).

Correction: Please note this section is wrong in that Hahnemule Fine Art Pearl is also a wood pulp based paper and NOT a cotton paper. In that sense it is more similar to the Innova paper than Crane Silver Rag.

Looking at these two radically new papers then, it is interesting to see the approach each company has taken as the philosophies are quite different.

Hahnemuehle Fine Art Pearl (HFAP) is a very 'papery' paper in its feel, while Crane Silver Rag (CSR) is much more rigid and much stronger (if the simple rip test is any indication!).  Some will definitely prefer the papery feel of HFAP, while others will appreciate the obvious strength of CSR.  They have a similar amount of sheen to their surface, with Crane being just a bit smoother.  The Crane paper has significantly less gloss differential - in fact none to speak of.  The Hahnemuehle paper has noticeable (but not really objectionable) gloss differential between printed and unprinted areas, but pretty much none across the printed surface itself.  Both papers stand up very well to handling, with next to no scuffing visible after considerable handling.

Both papers offer excellent deep blacks - the slightly smoother surface of the Crane makes the blacks appear fractionally deeper, but there's very little in it.  It's the whites where there is a key difference - CSR is a heavily washed paper with no optical brighteners, offering a pleasing natural warm white, while HFAP is a *very* bright white paper with a LOT of OBs in it.  This gives the paper a cool, clinical appearance - but tremendous punch.

They're both really excellent papers capable of holding beautiful, rich prints that can stand up to the most unforgiving lighting.  It really comes down to two main issues in the end - what is your attitude to optical brighteners, and do you prefer a warm or a cool print?  Likely, some images will suit each paper better than other - but hey, isn't it great to have choices?  For me, about 90% is going Crane Silver Rag's way - I love the stuff.  I generally prefer a warm toned print, especially with black and whites and portraiture, so CSR suits me well.  For Landscapes, I sometimes find myself leaning towards the more clinical and punchier Fine Art Pearl.

Of course I still love, and predominantly use, good old Hahnemuehle Photo Rag for almost everything - the king of fine art, truly matte papers - but for more extreme lighting conditions, and for prints I know are going to be in high traffic contexts, I'm using a lot of CSR and some HFAP as well. It's great to have such beautiful choices. 

A few other things....

Oh - the only minor issue really remaining with inkjet prints is gloss differential with (super) high gloss prints (a la Cibachrome/metallic) - which rumour has it will be solved shortly but in any case is not very fashionable right now anyway.  I've tried Pictorico High Gloss White Film, and considered importing it, but it still does offer noticeable gloss differential across the image so we've decided against it.  We have A4 sheets available at $4 a sheet if anyone wants to try it out for themselves without importing a whole box.

Congratulations again to all our award winning clients - this year at the APPAs and VIPPs, we were directly involved with scanning, retouching, printing, and colour managing a whole swag of award winning images (including category winners) - it's great to see people really using the techniques, products, and advice to such successful effect.  And clearly, quality is recognised when its made.  While awards will always be a bit controversial, and it's easy to take a jaded attitude towards them, they're a useful form of peer recognition and if nothing else they generally get us to concentrate on our own work for a while, and on working to our best level.  And that can only be a good thing.

Well, that's it for this time, and I've (finally) got a new D200 to play with, so I'm off!  Happy image making and I look forward to seeing you around the traps soon!