Wednesday 14 March 2012

Doing the Hahnemühle Rag

The best advice with photo-printing is "find a paper you like, and stick with it".  Although I've experimented with other papers, I've found that Epson printers with Epson inks like Epson papers best, and the Epson papers I like best are Premium Glossy, Premium Semigloss, and Matte Heavyweight -- totally bog-standard, cheap and cheerful choices.  Now that I've had custom ICC profiles made for these papers on my printer, and worked out a standard routine for getting a reasonable approximation of what I see on screen onto paper, I'm pretty happy to concentrate on actually making images I like.


However.  In the process of looking for something else, I came across these cute little tins of thirty 10cm x 15cm round-cornered "postcards" of various Hahnemühle papers, and on a whim bought a tin of Photo Rag 188, a pure cotton rag, matte finish "art" paper, and downloaded the free ICC profile for my printer.  To be honest, I was impressed that there actually is a profile for my printer, the Epson Photo Stylus 1400, a humble A3 dye ink printer.  Most "fine art" paper manufacturers do not consider dye inks (as opposed to pigment inks) worthy of contact with their precious papers.

Now, I've tried similar papers of various brands in the past, but never been convinced of their virtue.  There were some lovely papers, to be sure -- hand-made from angels' cotton socks steeped for 100 years in the purest unicorn pee -- but they all yielded indifferent (and occasionally bizarre) print quality on my printer.  This indicated to me that they were right to disdain my amateurish dye inks, and I simply accepted my lowly place in the Order of Things.  I was expecting the same experience with the Hahnemühle Photo Rag, but I had been suckered by the idea of those cute "postcards". In a tin! I know...

To my surprise, the print quality, on the evidence of some tiny 10cm x 15cm prints, is really very good indeed. Astonishingly good.  I'm impressed.  The colours are "wrong", in that they are too warm, but I'm sure a custom ICC profile would fix that.  It's the overall "gestalt" of the image, and in particular the shadow detail, that looks so good.

Here is an image as seen on my screen, followed by scans of prints of the same 8cm square portion (bottom centre left) printed at 360 dpi on Epson Premium Glossy and on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, with levels adjusted to 1.21:






Epson Premium Glossy

Hahnemühle Photo Rag 


Obviously, scans of prints are not accurate representations, but I think you can see what I'm talking about.  There is a clarity and separation to the shadow tones which is an improvement over the Epson paper, and the highlights are held beautifully, and really "sing".  There is an overall unity to the image which is very attractive, it's like having one's composition played through by a gifted musician.

There's no way I'd use Photo Rag as my "standard" paper -- it's too expensive and a "fine art" matte finish doesn't suit all types of photograph.  In the end, you really can't go wrong with Epson's own papers, and I have always been happy to use them, whether for exhibition purposes or for proof prints.  But for special prints of special images, I can well imagine using Photo Rag.  I've got a pack of A4 on order to see if the quality scales up, or whether there is a cutesy "miniaturisation" factor at work.  The A4 doesn't come in a tin, sadly.


UPDATE 16/3/2012:

As I suspected, the improvement at A4 is less visible: still there, but somehow with less impact.  There is a definite tactile pleasure to be had from the paper -- the paper's cotton is clearly derived from angels' bedsheets -- but I am not intending to print my own cut-out clothing.  It's curious how larger size affects one's perception.  My tests (above) were the equivalent of a 24cm x 24cm image @ 360dpi -- about as big as I'd normally aspire to -- but it just goes to show how picture-making is about wholes, not parts.

The tin will come in very handy, though.  I have a thing about tins.

8 comments:

Kent Wiley said...

This "tin" thing is an interesting bit of marketing. I seriously doubt they are bothering w/ the same ploy here in the U.S. (Of course I can't be bothered to actually find out for certain, this being the place for unsubstantiated internet opinion...) Any idea if the tins are being used to hawk the merch in the EU as well? Or is this a British thing?

Mike C. said...

Kent,

Seek -- Try an Amazon search on "hahnemuhle tin" -- and you will find...

Mike

Kent Wiley said...

You're right, of course. Amazon has all. Thanks for answering even the dumb questions.

Mike C. said...

Kent,

Unless, like me, you find the idea of a tin of tiny sheets of photo paper irresistible in itself, I should hold on to your money... At A4 size the quality improvement is less dramatic, though real, and I'm sure I could reproduce the "look" on Epson Matte Heavyweight if I could be bothered to work my prints more...

Mike

Kent Wiley said...

Yeah, @ $18 (£11.44) for a tin of 30 sheets of 4 x 6 cards, I don't think I'm too tempted, even for that cute little tin. Not printing much any more anyway. But I have found a nice alternative to my standard Epson Enhanced Matte: Moab lasal photo matte 235, which is double sided, so you can print tests on both sides or portions thereof.

Mike C. said...

This is exactly why "find a paper you like and stick with it" is such good advice... I might add to that "find a reasonably-priced paper you like and stick with it"!

Mike

Graham Dew said...

Hi Mike,

There is something wonderful about making little prints yourself that have been lovingly dodged, burned, adjusted to taste and then printed with a generous border. In the old days before digital you could never make all the local adjustments accurately in miniature, so of course we made test strips at full print size.

Whenever I print I make these little test prints until everything looks right, before committing pounds of paper and ink to a display size image. It's all a bit crazy really, because I pin these test prints up at work or use them as bookmarks; they tend to be more viewed than the 'display' sizes.

Graham

Mike C. said...

Graham,

Agreed, but I suspect you, like me, have a bit of a miniature fetish going on... I saw an exhibition once where all the images were about 5" x 7" on a BIG sheet of paper (A2 or bigger) -- looked really great.

Funny you should mention test strips -- I used to make them religiously in the darkroom, but never have done with digital, and was wondering (a) why not and (b) how? I've seen some interesting techniques on the web using gradients that I'm about to explore.

Mike