DevilN Details

The past week has been pretty busy, and not much has happened with the portfolio work in some time. The time that I’ve had to spend on photography has been centered around getting other prints made for sale, and struggling with paper and ink issues. I went to make a final print on a paper that I had done extensive testing with (Ilford Galerie Gold Fibre Silk(GFS)) on 8.5 x 11″ paper. I ordered a box of 13 x 19″ paper just for this particular print, this was the first time I had tried the paper in anything other than letter size.

I recently began reading the book Real World Color Management, along with several other web sites on the topic. All of this reading had reminded me that I never did a thorough analysis of the various media settings available when creating a paper profile and printing an image. So I spent a couple of days making test prints and waiting for them to dry before selecting the best paper type to use when printing on GFS. It turns out that the media setting I used when I first created a profile for this paper wasn’t really the best one (though it did offer the deepest blacks). So with my newly found paper setting I created a new profile for GFS and that is where the problems started. After printing the test sheets and allowing them to dry for 6 hours or so, I took a look at them under a strong light and with my glasses on. And I found something I had never seen before on this paper… the dreaded pizza wheel marks from my Epson printer. Pizza wheel marks are created by the feed mechanism Epson uses in their lower end (if you can call the 3800 that) printers without a vacuum suction transport. What pulls the paper through the printer are two sets of opposed rollers, rubber on the bottom and spiked wheels on the top. These spiked wheels sometimes dig into the ink and paper and leave columns of tracks that are affectionately known as pizza wheel marks.

Normally these marks are only visible when looking very closely at the print under direct lighting at a specific angle. These marks only show up on glossy type papers. In this instance I had not seen them in my initial evaluations of the paper, and was fairly annoyed that they’ve only showed up just as I’m preparing a print for a client. So I went back and made a few changes to the paper thickness settings hoping that would alleviate the problem. I wound up picking a paper thickness of 0.5mm and a platen gap of “wider”. This seemed to get rid of the marks. With my new best possible profile for GFS in hand I made what I thought was the final print of the ForestFlora5 image. My initial inspection under the light showed nothing wrong with the print, so I boxed it up to let it sit for 24 hours before its final spray.

A couple of days later I removed the print and put it up on the line to shoot it with a dose of Premiere Art Print Shield which is a spray designed to add a layer of scuff protection and lightfastness to inkjet images. Once on the line I could see two small white spots on the print. Hoping that they were just dust or something on the surface I backtapped, then blew, and finally brushed the print with my hand. Nope, the ink had not adhered to the paper in two pinprick sized spots. Before I printed on this sheet, I cleaned it as I normally do with an anti-static brush (with orthogonal brush strokes). Then I blasted the paper with a can of compressed air as a final cleaning measure before putting it into the printer. This sequence of prepping the paper has worked quite well for me over the years, and I rarely ever get flakes on my cotton rag papers, let alone leave dust on a glossy type paper before printing. Assuming that somehow I just had some bad luck and some piece of detritus had found its way on to the paper just before printing I grumbled about wasted time and went back to make a new print.

On my second “final” print I followed the same paper cleaning procedure. Then after the printer was finished I carefully examined the print under my light (with my glasses on). And sure enough there were two other small defects in the image, these weren’t missing inks but defects in the paper (as I now suspect the first problems were). These defects are quite small less than a square millimeter in area and practically impossible to see on the paper before making the print. By now I was getting kinda mad and kicking myself for trying to do a job on a new box of paper in a size I had never tried before. I sat down and made a third “final” print and hopped that there would be no issues with this one. The third sheet was good, and suffered from no paper defects. It is now dry, sprayed and bagged, ready for delivery.

When using new products, you never know what is going to happen, or trip you up. I sincerely hope that these problems were just isolated incidents since I really like this paper’s look and cost. However, the issue with the pizza wheel marks remain, and my search for the perfect photo black type of paper for me might not be over after all.

I’ve been out of town for the past few days camping near Lake Cachuma with the family and my son’s scout troop. But just before I left my computer gremlins left another present for me. My new hard drive to replace the failed mirror drive started reporting errors on Thursday night. Of course this angered me to no end. So my time on Thursday was spent trying to figure out what was wrong, or if I just have bad luck (more on the luck thing later). I was all set to just rip the drive out and wait for a replacement from Western Digital (this is an RE2 drive which is supposed to be very reliable). When I thought that maybe there could be a hardware problem in my drive subsystem. So I ran SpinRite 6 on this drive all night long in mode 4 which is the deep cleaning and analysis mode. In the morning it reported that there were no errors on the drive.

When we returned from the camping trip yesterday I was pretty perplexed about what to do about the drive system. For the time being I’ve just replaced the SATA cable, and re-added it to the mirror. The drive has been functioning properly yesterday and today with no errors. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but if the system once again starts logging errors on that drive while SpinRite claims that it is ok, I may have to look into getting a standalone RAID controller (which would totally suck).

Today when I got home my Epson 1400 printer had arrived. I had ordered one that was supposedly a “like new” printer that just was in an open box. Well that was being a bit generous. The printer has obviously been used, didn’t arrive in its original Epson box, was missing the install CD, and one CD printing accessory. I suspect that this may have been a floor model at the store I bought it from since there are signs of use in the form of light scratches on the cover and buttons. To make matters worse the printer didn’t work when I took it out of the box. It reported that the black ink cartridge was empty (even though the cartridge was new and in a sealed wrapper). After talking with Epson they said that the only way to tell if the problem was in the printer or a defective cartridge, was to put in a new cartridge. They shipped me one for free but it won’t get here ’till Friday. I couldn’t wait that long to find out if the printer really has a problem so I went to Frys Electronics and bought a replacement cart. Luckily the printer immediately fired up with the new cartridge, so maybe I just had a mid sized amount of bad luck going for me today. Luckily Epson does a pretty darned good job of standing by the warranty on their printers and is always ready to ship a replacement part (or whole printer if necessary) when something goes wrong.

With all the disk/printer problems in the past few days I haven’t done any work on my portfolio. I just wonder why the hardware problems are around every corner of my life when I’m trying to work on this portfolio, its like the gods are frowning on me for even attempting to do this…

My first commissioned art piece was given the go ahead today. It is a print of the image above, that was originally part of a set I did for a gallery show last year. None of the pieces in that show sold, but now finally someone has said hey, I like that, I want that, I’ll give you money for that! Maybe there will be more printed for her in the future, maybe things will start to happen and I’ll finally have this whole photography thing start bringing in a little money to offset all my expenses that I’ve racked up over the past few years. Its funny that the work I’m doing for my portfolio moved away from these flora type images. Looking at the copy of this image in the browser doesn’t quite do it justice (it may be that the greens don’t properly fit in the sRGB space), but at least it’ll give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

Actually making a real effort to market my photographs has been on my todo list for quite sometime. I guess I’m lucky that something is selling considering I’ve done nothing other than that gallery show last year in order to get my images out for people to see. At some point I am going to get a professional web site designer to build something for my artwork; but I keep dragging my feet on that issue because it is something I should be able to do myself. The problem is making the time to actually get it done.

Before I get to Piezography, a little bit about this blog. I don’t really know if the issues I’m having with this blog are related to my hosting provider, problems with WordPress plugins, or simply my own misunderstandings about how they are all supposed to work together. None of the statistics for my website or my blog show any activity at all. Now it could be that almost no one has found this yet, but I’ve had a friend already thank me for listing him on my blogroll, and the only way he would have known that I had done so was by visiting by blog. If any of you WordPress experts out there have a clue what might be wrong please let me know.

I’ve received two sets of sample prints made with the Piezography system and they look pretty fantastic! Good enough that I’m going to pick up a new printer so I can try them out myself. Its kinda hard to say why they are better (maybe they aren’t, just sufficiently different in a pleasing way) than the b/w prints I’m making with the Epson ABW driver on my 3800. I think one thing about them that I can put my finger on is that they do seem to offer greater resolution. The Piezography website has a demonstration of this using 1pt text from Alice in Wonderland. When I first saw it I was pretty skeptical but after holding a few of their prints in hand I guess they must have a point. Its kinda hard to be sure without printing the same image with both systems, but I’m intrigued enough to plunk down some money in order to give it a try. I’ll be getting the Epson 1400 I mentioned a few days ago, but probably won’t get the Piezography inks right away. Currently the Piezography system for the 1400 only works with a continuous inkflow system (CIS). Which means that there are no refillable cartridges for this printer yet (nor are there any for my 3800). There is a possibility that new carts will be coming soon, so I’ll wait a little while in the hopes I can get some. If not then I’ll wind up paying more for the inks and CIS than for the printer itself. I’m pretty excited about getting to work with the Piezography system, I’ve been reading about it for years, hoping to see why this is such a big deal.

Back to my own work. I’ve put my whole selenium QTR curve project aside for now. Tonight I just concentrated on printing a couple of b/w images exploring what I can do with the Epson inks and to see if I can tell where the difference lies between them (Epson) and the Piezography inks. I didn’t really come to any conclusions, and I think that to the untrained eye there probably wouldn’t be very much difference at all. I guess one other thing that really surprised me about the Piezography prints is how subtle their color tones are. Their selenium tone ink is just barely perceptible to me, while the sepia is certainly more noticeable, it’s not at all like what most of us think of what an old sepia toned photograph would look like. I printed the image at the top of this posting several times tonight with several variations in color toning applied, or with different printing profiles. After quizzing my daughter about the differences between them I’m left with an observation no more concrete than this: photographers must be nuts to obsess over the minutiae of toning, metamerism, neutrality, or what ever else may be the topic of the day.

when you’re colorblind. I spent way too much time fooling around in QTR making my own ink curve definitions. I’ve picked up where I left off over a week ago in trying to craft my own ink blend that will give me deep purple shadows so I can try and emulate the most awesome sepia/selenium split that I’ve ever seen. The problem is that while I can usually see differences between colors, I’m unable to recognize why they are different. This problem is especially acute for me when trying to isolate colors like I’m doing while building these curve descriptors for QTR. The process works as follows:

• Start off with an ink descriptor file that someone has already built for a paper and ink combo which is similar to what you’re trying to develop an ink descriptor for. Unfortunately for me, I’ve been unable to find anyone whose done this already on any type of paper at all.
• Determine the ink limits for your black and gray inks, and then partition them such that the inks overlap, but the lighter ones fall off rapidly as the darker shades of gray build up their densities.
• Apply your colored inks Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Light Cyan and Light Magenta in the appropriate percentages such that they together produce the color and tone you are after.

Just by kinda guessing and having a slight familiarity with ink curves I was able to make a purple shadow tone with out too much trouble, but the 3/4 and half tones were all over the place ranging from gray to blue, to pink, to purple, to warm. Its been a pretty rough day trying to figure out what percentages of CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) inks make the shade of purple I was after. And then have that purple gracefully evaporate into paper white. My brain hurts and I’m tired now. Several times I was ready to throw in the towel because I just couldn’t figure out how to control some particular peak or valley of warmth, or cool.

Eventually I hit upon an idea for figuring out the rough percentages of the inks to build my particular cherry/plum flavor of selenium. I went in to Photoshop and brought up the color picker, then selected a close approximation of this purple on the coarse vertical color ramp. Then in the fine grained color box I found the particular shade of shadow I was after. At this point the Photoshop color picker displays the numerical values for the selected color in RGB, HSL, Lab and yes CMYK. Next I filled a canvas with this deep purple over solid black and applied a linear gradient allowing for a graceful and steep ramp up from deep purple to max black. Finally I applied a layer of white above this, and then using another linear gradient mask applied over the white I now had a completely linear progression from pure white through deep purple and finally to max black. Saving this file I can now just open it in Photoshop and point to any place in the file, where the info tab will show me the CMYK percentages that make up that particular tone of my cherry/plum selenium.

Well that was all well and good, it allowed me to get my selenium curve to about 80% of where I wanted it to be. Smoothing out the bumps on my tone ramp and taming the warmth in the mid tones has been exasperating today. Knowing the CMYK values in Photoshop is only a rough approximation, that combined with the Light Cyan and Light Magenta inks (throwing off the percentages) has only got me close. I feel like my color perception problems are really making this difficult for me, and that I may be wasting my time with this (agggh, but I’m so close). And I’m not printing my portfolio, I’m printing pages and pages of test strips

So I’m attending this lecture series at the Julia Dean photo workshops that are hosted by Aline Smithson. On Thursday night I got to meet another extremely cool photographer Melanie Pullen. She’s achieved a good deal of notice in the photography world with her High Fashion Crime Scenes photographs. I had seen her work here and there before, but never really paid much attention to it until last night. Well it was just great to hear her tell the stories of how she came up on the idea for the series and then all the crazy, brazen things that she did in order to get her shoots done.

I’m sure that a lot of you other photographers out there have run into problems with people trying to prevent you from photographing whatever it is you might be interested in (I’ve certainly been hassled a lot). Well Melanie has on so many occasions just managed to talk her way through whatever obstacles were placed in front of her, whether it was policemen, highly agitated subway train conductors or just obstinant people with a chip on their shoulders. She’s done things like convince someone that her tripod, wasn’t really a tripod, but a “unipod” or some such thing that wasn’t explicitly disallowed by whatever set of made up rules this person was trying to enforce. The point of all this is that maybe we shouldn’t be so ready to pack up and go home just because some worry wart has nothing better to do than bother you for doing something that causes no one any harm at all.

Getting to hear from other photographers about what has worked for them (and also what hasn’t) is a worthwhile experience. There were several others in this lecture series that were also great to hear from:

• Ann Cutting
• Gil Garcetti (Way cooler and more interesting than I expected)
• Stephen Berkmen

When I got home from work today, a package from Zalman was here with a replacement fan for my CPU Cooler. I got it installed in about 10 min, and then installed the replacement hard drive for the one that failed. I’m typing up this blog entry from my main machine, while the RAID system is rebuilding the mirror (duplicating all files on to the new disk). With things going fairly smoothly with all the new hardware installed and running I’m feeling in a much better mood now.

I might not be able to get back to working on my QTR ink curves for the portfolio tonight, but at least I should be able to dig up some photos and start including them in the previous blog entries.

While the computer works on fixing itself I probably will need to spend some more time on configuring new plugins for WordPress, and working with my hosting provider to sort out some linking issues on the web site.

With yesterday’s post you’re all caught up with my current situation in creating my portfolio. My main computer has been down for a week now, with all my portfolio images stuck on the one remaining half of the mirror. Its been pretty frustrating waiting on the new fan for my cooler, and if I don’t have a replacement from these guys by the weekend, I will just have to buy another cooler and disassemble the whole machine in order to install it. If that is the case then that company will forever loose my business.

This new free time that I have has allowed me to get this blog working again and make the entries describing the first week or so of making the portfolio. Also in that time I wound up having to purchase a new color printer for my wife and kids to use. I selected an Epson R280 because it was relatively inexpensive and also a capable photo printer. The kids are happy, and in the mean time I’ve been looking into Jon Cone’s piezography printing system. Cone’s system uses only black and gray inks in place of the color ones for making b/w images. The system has been around for a number of years now and continues to evolve. After looking at the latest ink system he’s come out with for the Epson 1400 13″ printer I am now having second thoughts about the R280 that I just purchased for the kids. Luckily the store I bought it from has a 30 day no questions asked return policy.

Using pure gray b/w inkset sounds very appealing and apparently makes for some stunning prints. The Epson 1400 is a very economically priced 13″ printer, and fits in with my decision to limit my prints on matte papers to 13″ width or less. This piezography system is only for matte papers, and sounds like it might be a perfect fit for my matte printing needs, while also doubling as a color printer for the kids when they need it. The piezography inks have a reputation for being the very best available for b/w printing, so I’m looking forward to doing a knockdown dragout comparison between piezography on the 1400, QTR and the Epson ABW system on my 3800. However this won’t really happen until after I’ve printed this first portfolio.

I need to keep reminding myself to stay focused on getting the portfolio done, not endlessly fooling around with new printers, inks, RIPs etc.

In case you didn’t get it, ink was the next big issue on my mind. My photo printer is a 17″ Epson 3800, a cutting edge printer that is capable of producing quite wonderful images. Straight out of the box the 3800 comes with 2 different options for making a b/w print. You can simply convert the image to grayscale in photoshop and fire it off to the standard color print driver. Printing b/w this way is simply the easiest thing going. However it uses a lot of the color inks (cyan, magenta, and yellow) in creating the b/w image. The colored inks are viewed with a degree of suspicion by many in the b/w inkjet community for several reasons, with the main two being they degrade color stability of the print over time (colored inks tend to fade faster) and sometimes, some people are able to perceive the influences of the color inks. The second more complex b/w printing method is using the Advanced Black and White (ABW) option that Epson provides. While not quite as straightforward as printing using the color option, ABW isn’t too difficult either. Printing with the ABW driver uses much much less color ink to create a neutral print, and it also offers a deeper dmax than the color driver.

Generally when printing b/w I go straight to the ABW driver because of the dmax, and controls for adjusting shadows, highlight and toning of the image. I myself rarely print a straight up neutral b/w version of my photos. Most of the time I add some warmth to my images. I expect that when printing this portfolio I will decide on how warm the prints should be and keep it consistent throughout the portfolio. On top of my tendency for warm b/w images I also have been trying to come up with a way of creating a split toned image to my liking. So far I have not been able to do this with my 3800. Last year I was at a workshop and met a photographer who had produced an absolutely stunning portfolio, with a sublime sepia/selenium split tone. I’d never seen anything quite like it before. Given my colorvision problems (I’m red/green colorblind) it is especially difficult for me to distinguish purple from blue. However on these selenium toned shadows I could actually see the purple, something I normally just can’t make out. Since then, whenever the mood strikes me I’ve spent a little time in photoshop fooling around trying to reproduce it, or also trying to find an ABW combination that gets me close. So far I’ve been unsuccessful in that endeavor, which leads me to my next topic.

QTR

Quad Tone Rip is a cool piece of software written by Roy Harrington. It is a standalone print driver for many Epson inkjet printers, which is built on top of the Gimp/Gutenprint print engine. The neat thing about QTR is that you have pretty much complete control of each individual ink channel in your Epson printer. Learning how to use QTR for blending your own inks, creating curves and icc profiles is not for the faint of heart (nor possibly for the sane of mind either). Since I had never been able to come up with a decent selenium tone in Photoshop, or with my other b/w profiling (Spyder3 Print – a topic for another day) or ABW controls, I thought that maybe I would actually force myself to learn how to use QTR in the hopes of developing my own ink curves for the selenium tone purple shadows I was after. Of course the only reason I embarked upon this additional task was because I didn’t already have enough on my plate with selecting images, editing them, choosing paper, formatting and printing my portfolio, on top of the normal everyday things like going to work, delivering a new software system, and making time for my family. Maybe I have some new kind of attention deficit disorder, kinda like ADHD in kids, but kinda in reverse for my adult mind that has to find a way to fill up every possible moment in time or uncommitted neural processing moment with a new (and rarely easy) potentially distracting task.

I contacted an old inkjet acquaintance who was familiar with QTR (thanks Lou!) and asked for some pointers, between his help, the poorly written QTR manual, the internet and lots of fooling around I actually made some progress and was able to work up a partial curve for producing my deep purple shadows. I printed many test strips with curves adjustments, and lots of questions to my daughter about the colors of purple/blue that she could see and I couldn’t. In the process I had to pretty much start from scratch, and it eventually dawned on me that I was going to have to start with just black and magenta, and work my way up from there. Eventually my light grey to magenta/black test strip actually smoothed out and even began to have a look like it was approaching linearity.

I set the QTR ink blending project aside for a few hours, and expected to come back and start mixing in some cyan in the hopes of moving toward purple and black. During this whole business with ink curves, the temperature in the greater L.A. area began to rise into the 90’s. This began to strain my computers, my photo editing workstation became mysteriously slow, with almost every little action spiking the dual core CPU. Finally one of my disk drives died, unfortunately it was one of my main disks with all my photography on it. Luckily that drive was part of a RAID mirror, so there were two copies of everything. After cursing my bad luck I ordered a replacement drive, and figured with the disk in the process of flaking out the I/O subsystem on my machine was being taxed and that was the cause of the slowness of my computer. Oops not so fast inkboy! My computer wasn’t finished F’in with me yet. The next morning the fan on my $80 CPU cooler failed! Stop, don’t pass go, head straight on over to jail. Sometimes I just have the worst luck when it comes to computer hardware.

And that is where my portfolio project has been for the past week, in jail. The people that make my ridiculously huge and expensive CPU cooler are right here in southern California. I called to ask about getting a replacement fan, and they said that they would ship me a new one right away. No need to send in the defective unit, no need to spend a fortune on a replacement (which would require disassembling the whole bloody computer). It should be there in a couple of days. Well, its been a week now, no dice, no computer, no inkjet curves, no portfolio printing, no ability to even get some sample photos to include in these ridiculously long blog postings.

The next major concern after the b/w issue is on what type of paper will these images be printed? I titled this post with the question of paper or plastic which is a bit of a joke because I never really considered printing the portfolio on the RC papers. But with the new air dried glossy emulators like Silver Rag, Harmon Gloss and Ilford Gold Fibre Silk their look is close enough that the wording is apt. The whole paper issue when it comes to inkjet printing is really a drag in my opinion. There are so many choices, the differences between some papers is so slight, the cost can be painfully expensive (over $5.00 for a piece of paper!), and the lingering doubt about how well these things will hold up over the long haul make the paper chase no fun at all. Several times a year a major paper manufacturer comes out with a new product that is supposed to address all issues. It gets the inkjet printer community all in a tizzy and those of us who are so inclined go through another round of trying to figure out if we’ve found the silver bullet.

Well it when it comes to paper choice the masochist in me comes out again. If I could, I would only print on matte papers. When an image works on matte papers I’m extremely happy. The lack of the blinding reflection when viewed from the wrong angle makes matte more preferable to me than what we get with the glossies. The feel of the matte papers in my hand is also much more to my liking. So far none of the new glossies on cotton or alpha cellulose comes close to the wondrous feel in hand that you get from a thick cotton rag paper like Epson Velvet Fine Art (VFA) or Hahnemuhle Photo Rag (HPR). If someone could come up with a stable ink and cotton rag combo that could deliver a dmax of 1.9 or greater I’d probably never look for another type of paper. But we aren’t there yet, and might not ever be. The fact is the best I’ve ever been able to achieve on matte paper is a dmax of 1.7 from VFA. Where as you get to a dmax of 2.2 on almost any glossy paper. And therein lies the rub. In my opinion, some images simply cannot be made to work within the confines of the matte paper’s dynamic range.

There have been a few times in the past year (since the introduction of the air dried glossy emulators) that I’ve thought maybe I should just throw in the towel with matte papers and stick with the new glossies. At these times I’ve ordered sample packs of these new papers and done tests with them, and all of them have had some major problem that caused me to rule them out (until recently, which I’ll get to later).

1. Not a single one of these papers has been tested by Wilhelm so we have no metric for comparison with all the papers that have been around for a few years.
2. None of these papers actually produced an image that was demonstrably superior to what I would get on humble Epson Premium Luster (which is also very inexpensive by comparison).
3. Most of them had an annoying surface texture that I just couldn’t get used to. Silver Rag was probably the worst in this dept. Harmon gloss didn’t really have an awful texture to it, though some think it too smooth and therefore too plasticky looking.
4. All of them were priced insanely high. Epson Exhibition Fibre (EEF) was the very worst in this dept. I’ve been a pretty big fan of Epson papers and their value for years (VFA is one of the very best papers out there). Epson has also been very consistent about delivering good quality paper with no defects or curl. However my first box of Exhibition Fibre was clearly defective with micro cracks. The paper may have delivered the highest image quality of all the glossies (but the surface texture is an acquired taste), but in the end I couldn’t get over the cost.

With that diatribe out of the way, I can now get to the latest entry into the air dried glossy emulator field, Ilford Galerie Gold Fibre Silk (GFS). This paper is different in a number of areas than all the rest. First and foremost it is priced affordably! A box of 50 8.5×11″ sheets can be had for about $40.00 or $0.79/sheet, where as EEF costs about $1.56/sheet in 8.5×11″. GFS is also different in that it is a natural paper, somewhat creamy looking compared to everything else that is overflowing with optical brightening agents (OBA). But when measured that paper white and dark blacks (with Epson K3 inks) is actually closer to neutral gray than any other glossy I’ve seen. Finally the GFS paper delivers a good high quality image with nice acutance, and a non-intrusive surface texture that doesn’t suffer from pizza wheel marks on my 3800 (unlike the retarded EEF).

So I’ve finally found one of the non-RC glossy papers that is to my liking. On the matte paper side I have always been a major fine of Epson’s VFA. It is a paper in the cold press style (which means with surface texture) and has OBAs (but they’re not obnoxious). VFA is a beautiful paper, but I don’t use it for everything. The surface texture doesn’t work for closeups of people in my opinion (but is great for landscapes), and sometimes a set of photos might look better on a paper with fewer or no OBAs. The images that will make up this portfolio will lend themselves to being printed on a textured surface so I’m not considering my favorite hot press (smooth) styled papers like Epson Ultrasmooth Fine Art (USFA) or the ubiquitous HPR 308. My paper choices (yes it was long in coming I know) for this portfolio boiled down to VFA, Hahnemuhle German Etching (GE) and GFS.

German Etching is a textured paper like VFA except it is more cream colored due to fewer OBAs. I’ve just got my first box of GE a week or so ago, but I had seen it before and kinda knew I would like it. I printed a few test images on the paper an it does indeed produce a very nice image. I think for this portfolio I might actually prefer it to VFA. But I wound up eliminating GE for strictly economical reasons this time. I already have about 17 sheets of VFA in 17×22″ ready to print on. I’d have to buy a box of GE which would be about $254 or $5.16/sheet (ouch). But I like the paper and when I buy my next big box of matte paper it will either be GE or Hahnemuhle William Turner which is slightly cheaper textured with no OBAs at all.

So finally it was narrowed down to either VFA or GFS, matte or glossy, bright or natural. I guess by now it is apparent that there is an anal/masochist/analytic side to my personality. I spend a lot of time analyzing my choices/weighing my options. Another thing I like about printing on the matte papers is that it is more challenging to make a satisfying image on a paper with a smaller dynamic range and color gamut. If I can get my images to work on a matte paper there is a greater sense of satisfaction that I feel. Not only was I able to produce this beautiful image, but I didn’t take the easy route, I made it on a surface that is harder to work with but more pleasing to hold and less abrasive on the eyes (glare on glossies).

After making a few prints on 8.5×11″ paper I was satisfied that these images will work on both VFA and GFS papers. Since I can produces a satisfactory rendition of these images on the matte papers that is what I’ve decided to go with. However, during this process I also came to another conclusion. I think that (yes not 100% sure about this) I’ve convinced myself to stick with matte papers when printing images that aren’t going to be framed behind glass. And to go ahead and pick the GFS paper for everything else that will be framed. I’m leaning in this direction because once an image printed on matte paper goes behind the glazing, no one gets to feel be beauty of the sheet, and the abrasive reflections are once again added via the glass (I haven’t tried the super expensive non-reflecting museum glazing yet). So I may be limiting my purchases of matte paper to nothing larger than 13×19″ sheets since you can’t really hold a 17×22″ piece of paper.