DevilN Details

I’ve been printing pretty much at every free moment that I have at home. Using these new inks is quite interesting, but not a slam dunk for me. Normally I won’t be posting photos of my family on this blog, but I’ve been staring at many prints of this image all day long and I figure it will come up in my comments.

After that first night of printing with the Piezography inks in my 1400 my hopes were pretty high and I was excited about all the changes that I was seeing in the ink colors throughout the image. By the middle of the day it started to dawn on me that something wasn’t quite right with the colors that I was seeeing. They were just too colorful to have come out of the bottles of gray muck that I had poured into the ink cartridges before beginning this whole process. After thinking about this a little harder my mind began to gain some traction on what was happening here. Putting 2 and 2 together I finally realized that it was the earlier prints that were more colorful while in the later ones the warmth around the sun that looked so amazing was settling down to a more expected shade of gray. As I continued to use the system the last bits of color were finally being removed from the ink lines and heads, and I was beginning to see the true color of what the Piezography Special K6 inkset looks like on the Epson 1400. It was much different than I had expected.

The split toned nature of the images produced by this system are rather subtle, and I don’t really see much neutral in the images at all. The sepia ink is pretty strong in this combination and as the image gets darker it takes on a rather ruddy hue in the shadow areas. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to accurately describe what I see when using this new inkset and have a few ideas. However this initial effort to blog about what I’m doing and seeing won’t be perfect. Objectively describing what these prints look like will be difficult and I suspect not very satisfying for the reader. When I see a slew of Lab values describing a step wedge it doesn’t translate at all into a visual representation of luminance and color in my head. Yet at this point I can think of no other way to objectively state the subtle changes in color that these inks present on the page.

This ink system really does look best on the high quality matte papers like Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, German Etching and Epson Velvet Fine Art. But these papers are all quite expensive (each sheet costs more than $1.00). I’ve burned through a lot of expensive paper in the past week fooling around with this system. So one of my first goals was to figure out what inexpensive paper would work best for me. I do lots of testing and proof prints in my normal approach to working up an image. So its pretty important for me to have a paper that I know well and that costs a reasonable amount of money. Most people default to Epson Enhanced Matte (EEM) for this duty because it offers a good dmax (with Ultrachrome K3 inks) and is very reasonably priced. However, for myself I’ve never liked how shadows and black areas work with EEM and UC K3. This combination gives a mottled appearance of over inking in the shadow areas. I have tons of this paper that’s just been sitting around my house for the past 2 or 3 years (ever since I got a 2400 and the UC K3 inks came out).

With the arrival of the Piezography inks I had high hopes for being able to make use of all the EEM that I have here. Well after the first two prints I gave up on EEM with Piezography. This paper offers the weakest dmax with the piezography inks (which is the exact opposite of UC K3). Not only that, but the mottling in the shadow areas was still there! So it was in fact a double whammy of no and HELL no to using EEM with this new system.

Thanks to a suggestion from another B/W ink genius I found out about Premier Art Matte BW 210 (PBW). This paper is available from MIS at www.inksupply.com and also from Atlex.com. It is a much more affordable $0.22/sheet and doesn’t suffer from the same poor shadow performance as EEM. I’ve been using this paper somewhat successfully over the past two years with my 3800. The Piezography system didn’t come with QTR curves for this paper, or with icc profiles that would allow a soft proof preview. My first couple of prints on this paper with the new inks weren’t so hot. So this weekend I set out to systematically figure out what to do about an inexpensive proofing paper. I looked at EEM, PBW, Premier Art Hot Press 205 (not really that cheap) and started printing the image at the top of this post with many of the various QTR curves that are made for the 1400 and Piezography K6 inks. Eventually I found a curve file that works well with PBW. Using the curve for H. Photo Rag Bright White gave a decent image on PBW. Still not really as good as the more expensive papers, but close enough. PBW has kind of a lot of OBAs so the paper white is more blueish in color than EEM. I haven’t yet measured the dmax with the K6 inkset on PBW, but will get to that tomorrow after my step wedge has had a night to dry and settle down.

Woah, it late, already after 11:00. I’ll have more to say in my next post.

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