Let The Games Begin

Baryta fine art paper evaluation update

Obvious hint to the first comparison that will be out the door. Stay tuned.

A few weeks ago we asked the community a simple question; What’s your go-to baryta paper? Of course, you delivered. There was massive participation in the survey of the big players as well as quite a few comments for papers not included in our survey. If you missed that newsletter and want to gander at the survey results, take a look.

In earnest we started down the road. Our first batch of paper we’re subjecting to scrutiny arrived last week. We’re itching to fire up the printers and start making prints. Keeping that desire to start running random prints with our new (to us) paper, Les and I decided we should probably come up with standard criteria to be evaluated. Always a good idea if you want to produce something useful at the end of any sort of evaluation. This goes doubly so if those results are to be valuable to anyone else.

Evaluation Methodology

After much debate, pulling of hair, and gnashing of teeth we decided the ultimate arbiter for us is… drum roll please… how two prints look side by side. Then came the even harder part. How might we quantify how those prints look and what factors will we compare that can be put into a usable reference?

Please keep in mind that we don’t do technical reviews. We are both photographers and fine art printmakers. What matters most to us is how our images ultimately look on fine art papers. Does the printed image reflect our vision? Do we have to sacrifice any elements of that vision to fit the paper? Is the manufacturer consistent batch to batch? Are their ICC profiles accurate?

Obviously we’ll need more than one image to evaluate. It would make sense to have both black and white as well as color images to compare. That’s what we’ll do. A detailed black and white image with subtle tonal gradation from deep shadow to bright highlight will be one standard image. On the color side we’ll use two images. The first will contain a broad spectrum of colors. The second image will contain challenging color shadow detail and require fine degrees of highlight separation and rendering (my specialty).

We’ll make prints for those on the new paper we’re evaluating and our work-horse baryta — Moab Juniper Baryta. We’ll critically evaluate those prints side by side using our calibrated GTI GraphicLite viewing booth. We’ll then make relative assessments of a list of criteria against that go-to workhorse paper.

List Of Evaluation Criteria

We’re asking the community to chime in on the evaluation criteria as a gut-check for us and to let us know in the comments if there’s anything we missed or something super important to you. Since all of these evaluations will be relative to our studio’s workhorse paper it should be useful working backwards if we arrange the evaluation properly.

• Paper base color/tone

• Surface gloss

• Surface texture

• Perceived D-max (how black is black)

• Perceived contrast (should be closely related to above)

• Perceived OBA (how apparent any optical brightening agent is; related to the first criteria but some papers’ OBA is not only obvious but obnoxious)

• Shadow separation

• Highlight rendering

• Color accuracy of manufacturer supplied ICC profile

• Perceived color saturation

• Weight

• Hand (related to weight but this is subjective feel in the hand)

The plan is to devise an arbitrary numbering scale to quantify the criteria for quick comparison. We’ll also include subjective notes where appropriate. We intend to publish each evaluation as they are completed and also publish a comprehensive guide to baryta papers when we’re done. It might be a while as there are a lot of papers out there even when limiting this to baryta semi-gloss papers only.

Note: Baryta papers are inkjet papers that use barite or barium sulphite in the coatings to achieve “bright whites”. These inkjet papers are designed to have a look of traditional satin/semi-gloss finished appearance of traditional cotton fiber based darkroom photo papers.

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If you like what we do and want to help push along this evaluation in terms of time, paper, and ink consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you are able. Every little bit helps. A sincere thank you to those that have helped out so far!!!