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.