Section 3: Image Output

Printing: printer

The consensus of industry veterans is that inkjet has surpassed all other photo printing technologies in every regard. A pigment inkjet print on archival paper will last longer and show as much or more subtlety than any other photographic medium. Only b&w darkroom prints can equal inkjet.

Each inkjet printer has a maximum paper width of 8.5", 13", 17", 24", 44", or 60". Even if you're certain you'll never need to print larger than 13" width, there are still important advantages to 17" printers. 8.5" and 13" printers carry their ink supply piggyback on their printhead assembly, which limits the total amount of ink the printer can handle to a very small quantity. This means irritatingly frequent ink cartridge changes. It also means paying far more for ink over the life of the printer, since cartridges are generally not refillable. On top of all that, colour accuracy tends to be an issue with the smaller printers, and that's the last thing you want to have to cope with in a printer.

Epson pioneered photo-quality inkjet printing. Both Canon and HP have recently decided to join the game. Both have made very promising starts, and both have their legions of very vociferous supporters. By all reports the Canon 5100 and 6100 are excellent. What's hard to get away from is the sheer excellence and relative affordability of the Epson 3800. The 3800 does not support roll paper and costs a few dollars in ink to switch from matte paper to photo paper. Let's talk about that:

Roll paper is preferred in production environments but requires de-curling before the final print will lie flat. This is enough of a hassle that I've long since switched to cut sheet paper in spite the slightly greater cost (in many, but not all, cases). Another downside of roll stock is printing smaller than the width of the roll. If you're developing an image or printing for a portfolio or simply prefer small print sizes, you still have to work with the width of your roll or waste a portion of each job. You can use a smaller roll than your maximum carriage width – such as a 13" roll in a 24" printer – but small rolls come on smaller-diameter spools and so require even more de-curling. There are also fewer paper choices in small roll format.

Switching from matte to photo is something you may well never do, given the recent introduction of fibre photo papers. More about that below.

Buyer beware: Epson offers the 3800 in a "professional edition" bundle with RIP software. You only want the printer; the RIP is crippled to only work with Epson-branded papers. Other manufacturers may have similar "deals".

Printing: ink

For document and casual photo printing there is a whole industry around 3rd party, inexpensive inks. For personal fine art printing, forget it. The official manufacturer's inks for a photo printer are unquestionably a major expense; they're also unquestionably a necessity. Longevity, gamut, hardware compatibility, and profiling are all serious issues that add up to this conclusion.

Given that you can't avoid using the manufacturer's ink, buying a printer with reasonable ink cartridge replacement costs is an important consideration.

Printing: paper

Just as camera bodies and lenses represent entire microcosms onto themselves, so also does photo paper. Given that this essay is about fine art photography, with the implication that prints will be suitable for selling (or at least showing) in the rarified atmosphere of art galleries, we can considerably narrow the field. The overriding consideration becomes longevity (for an excellent, if biased, primer see here).

Matte paper: For hundreds of years paper mills in Europe, such as Hahnemühle, Arches, Sihl, and St. Cuthberts have been producing archival quality art papers for watercolour, sketching, charcoal, and pastels. These papers are traditionally made from the more expensive cotton rag instead of wood pulp, since wood pulp contains lignin, which is corrosive over time, and paper-making pre-dates the chemistry we now use to create lignin-free wood pulp.

Matte papers can be used for inkjet printing with the application of a suitable clay-based ink-receptive coating. Such papers are perfectly suitable for the reproduction of watercolour, sketches, etc. They can also be used for printing photographs ... so long as the photographer is willing to accept the same lack of colour vividness and especially the lack of true blackness that distinguishes a watercolour from an oil painting. Some images depend of colour intensity and/or deep blacks; some do not.

An advantage of using matte paper for photography is that the lack of sheen makes the image easily visible from any angle. This is an advantage that pretty much disappears as soon as the print is framed behind glass for protection. But the signal advantage of matte for inkjet printing was longevity. Until a few years ago, non-matte inkjet papers were based on resin-coated (RC) wood pulp technology, and print life spans topped out at 60 to 70 years. In contrast, cotton rag matte papers routinely hit twice those numbers.

RC photo paper: For decades we've lived in a world in which a photograph has been a colour image printed on shiny white RC paper. The slick, plasticky look of RC paper may appeal to the pink flamingo lawn ornament set; but it's a decided downer in the gallery world. Even though art photographs are most often framed behind glass, when handled and viewed loose, anyone who is used to dealing with cotton rag matte papers will have an immediate negative reaction to RC stock.

But the advantage of RC paper is also compelling: images have just about as much vividness of colour and intensity of tone as the photographer cares to throw at them. Their stark Tide-with-bleach whiteness may be off-putting, but it also makes the task of accurate colour reproduction significantly easier to accomplish.

Torn between the opposing polarities of the advantages of matte paper and the advantages of photo paper, inkjet printer manufacturers struggled to make printers that worked acceptably with both paper stocks. This resulted in printers that supported two different black ink cartridges: one optimized for matte paper, the other for photo paper.

Notes on Fig. 7 (click for a larger view): The colours and something of the textures show, but not the degree of gloss. Entrada is a cotton rag matte, Inkpress Warm Tone and the Ilford are fibre barytas, Epson Proofing is a non-OBA RC, Premier Art Luster is an OBA RC, Innova Fiba-Print is a fairly white (but probably not OBA) fibre.

Fibre photo paper: In the world of chemical darkroom, black-and-white photography the conflict between matte and RC was pretty much a non-issue. The matter had been settled long since with the use of exquisite and subtlety-finished fibre papers. RC papers have the slickly smooth surface finish of plastic or glass unless an artificial textured pattern is impressed into them. Fibre papers retain the same natural texture of wood or rag fibres that we see in traditional rag matte paper, but add the varnished sheen needed to retain colour vividness.

While RC paper is typically pure white, fibre papers range from just off-white to cream. Pure white is normally achieved by adding chemicals called optical brightening agents (OBAs). In addition to the unaesthetic appearance of the nearly blue-white of OBA-enhanced papers, OBAs also have a reputation for decomposing, causing the paper to yellow over time.

Non-OBA papers are typically some shade of cream in colour, rather than pure white. This warmth is pleasant to the eye but slightly reduces the overall range of values the paper can reproduce. More significantly, the cream colour blends with every other colour in the image, creating what we call a yellow or orangish colour cast. The effect of this is simply pleasant in a black-and-white image. In a colour image a yellow cast is simply another term for dinge. Fortunately, given the precision of digital editing tools, the yellow cast of off-white paper can be neutralized by an equivalent blue cast.

The upshot of all this (and I could have spared you slogging through the last several paragraphs) is that fibre-based photo papers have the longevity and, arguably, the aesthetic elegance of traditional cotton rag art papers married to the full colour vividness of RC. Sadly, they also retain something of the hefty price tag of traditional cotton rag art papers. So unless money is no object, a photographer needs to use an inexpensive RC paper for image development (called a proofing paper), plus an expensive fibre paper for sellable prints.

As I write this, Ilford Gold Fibre Silk is the runaway best seller among fibre papers. Ilford was clever enough to produce an uncompromisingly excellent paper, then market it at an exceptionally competitive price. A really excellent and also really inexpensive proofing paper is Epson Proofing Paper White Semimatte. It is an RC and lacks the heft of the Ilford fibre, but in paper colour, texture, and ink-handling the Epson paper is an uncannily close match to the Ilford.

Another excellent fibre paper is Inkpress Warmtone Baryta. This has significantly more tooth to the texture than the silky smoothness of the Ilford, and is a very slightly deeper cream in colour. The Epson Proofing Semimatte remains the best choice for proofing the Inkpress I know of, in spite the mismatch in surface texture.

Printing: profiles

We've already discussed display and camera profiling. There is no such thing as a printer profile; rather a separate profile needs to be created for each combination of printer, inkset, and paper stock. Given, as explained, that we always use the manufacturer's inkset designed for our particular make and model of printer, that eliminates one variable, but still leaves the printer itself plus the paper. One of the key reasons for buying a high-quality (expensive) printer is that manufacturing tolerances are now so incredibly tight, that the differences between different units of the same make and model essentially drop out of the equation. Having eliminated ink and printers, that leaves paper variations. Printer manufacturers address this by creating extremely accurate profiles for each of the paper stocks they sell for use in a given model printer, and supplying these profiles along with the printer. A typical high-end Epson printer, for example, comes with profiles for roughly a dozen Epson-branded paper stocks that the printer supports.

In theory one could simply stick to using Epson papers with an Epson printer, Canon papers with a Canon printer, etc. But companies like Ilford, Hahnemühle, Arches, etc. want you to buy their brands of paper; and to encourage you to do so, they provide profiles on their web sites for each paper stock they sell for all the different printer models the paper is compatible with. Only problem is these profiles, with no exception I've ever encountered, are ghastly.

Another option: one can buy the hardware and software needed to create printer profiles for a few thousand dollars. My own theory is that these are the same tools paper companies use to create the profiles on their websites, so I've been reluctant to spend that kind of money for such a suspect solution. Similarly, there are individuals who own printer profiling tools and who do business making custom printer/paper profiles for photographers. Again, my experience with third-party paper manufacturer profiles has left me highly suspicious.

Instead, what I'm findng is that nearly all the best third-party paper stocks work perfectly well with the profile of the most similar paper produced by your printer's manufacturer. For example, if you want to use Ilford Gold Fibre Silk in an Epson 3800 (which I do), simply use the profile for Epson Premium Luster paper in Photoshop, and set the paper type in the 3800 driver to Epson Premium Luster (but adjust the paper thickness setting from 2 to 4). Clearly, either third-party paper manufacturers are going to great lengths to replicate the ink receiving coatings used by printer manufacturers, or there is now a standard coating recipe in use in the industry.