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Kerey
4-May-2006, 15:40
This is to follow up on John Brownlow's more B&W-oriented user report for Silver Rag... hopefully those looking into color prints will find the following useful.

I just received two copies each of two color landscape images (print size = 8"x10") from West Coast Imaging. One copy was printed on Crystal Archive gloss from the Chromira, the other on their Epson 9800 using Silver Rag. Both images were drum scanned (Danny Burk) at 3200 dpi from RVP100 (4x5). The Chromira files were set to 300 dpi, the Epson ones to 360 dpi; the two copies of each image were otherwise identical. I plan to print both images at significantly larger sizes and wanted to get a sense of both WCI printing options ahead of time.

Both versions of both files look VERY good. As expected from previous comments on Silver Rag and inkjet printing generally, the SR prints are somewhat (but only very slightly) flat. I doubt I would even notice when viewing one w/o the other. The blacks of the SR are not quite as deep as those from the Chromira, but neither image is particularly dark; the shadows are well rendered in both cases, as are the highlights.

The Silver Rag prints are slightly more saturated and noticeably sharper. Saturation aside (I could easily have prepped the Chromira files to match the others), the sharpness difference between the two copies reminds me of that between two identical images shot with a moderate vs. high quality lens. The greater sharpness of the Silver Rag prints is apparent even when viewing from ~2 feet.

At first glance, I preferred the Chromira print almost entirely due to the gloss surface. After some examination, though, the heavier stock and greater sharpness of the Silver Rag has me leaning in that direction.

What's a digital printing novice to do? I'll have to stare at them some more I guess. Is the apparent sharpness edge for the SR prints due simply to the higher printing resolution (300 vs 360 dpi)? Any comments from others using Silver Rag for color printing?

Kerey

Kirk Gittings
4-May-2006, 16:01
The attration of the glossy surface will disappear the minute you frame them under glass, but the sharpness of the SR will remain. Glass is the great equalizer of print surfaces.

Michael Gordon
4-May-2006, 16:11
You're seeing the differences between a paper with an emulsion and one without. Inkjet papers (excluding swellable papers) are generally sharper across the board because the image sits on top of the paper. You'd need to sharpen the Chromira-destined file more to achieve the same apparent sharpness as with Silver Rag.

Brett Deacon
4-May-2006, 16:12
Having so many choices for great digital prints is a nice problem to have!

If you own or plan to own your own printer, the decision may be made for you. I own an Epson 9800 and absolutely love the results I'm getting on Silver Rag. Compared to the previous (mostly matte) papers I've used the blacks are much blacker, the colors have more "pop," and the overall look is more three-dimensional. I also do my own matting and framing and really appreciate Silver Rag's heaviness and ability not to warp and crimp, especially when compared to Premium Luster paper. I struggled with deciding whether to dry mount 12x36 inch Premium Luster prints but never even considered doing so with Silver Rag.

Crystal Archive prints from the Chromira/Lightjet are spectacular, but so are prints on Silver Rag. With the deep blacks and saturated colors I'm getting I feel absolutely no need to outsource any printing jobs. And I enjoy the benefits of the relatively greater sharpness of the Epson printer, which does better justice to the fine detail in my landscapes, the pursuit of which is why I took up LF photography in the first place. For me, controlling the printing process myself with the new K3 inks and papers like Silver Rag allows me to make prints that best match my vision. Of course, as always, YMMV.

neil poulsen
4-May-2006, 16:57
Where are people getting the Museo Silver Rag? I'm interested and would like to try it out, but I don't know where to order.

Jeremy_D
4-May-2006, 17:42
Commercial plug - If you're in Australia (or not afraid of international shipping), you can try Image Science (http://ww.imagescience.com.au). Rolls in stock now! Sheets due soon. Their is also a printing service using Silver Rag, so you can 'try before you buy' or carry on running your own printer with matte black while Image Science look after the semi/glossy side of things (or vice versa).

User Report - Silver Rag is just great - incredibly strong as a substrate, and wonderful print quality - luminous black and whites, and lovely rich colours. Every single print done on it so far has attracted a 'wow' reaction - and several won awards at the recent Australian Professional Photography Awards (APPAs).

As Brett said above, Silver Rag is MUCH easier to mount/frame than super high gloss papers, and offers a lot of the depth and three dimensionality of these types of prints, without major (any) reflectivity issues.

The complete lack of optical brighteners in SR really does not seem to be an issue, but an asset. It's not as bright white as Fine Art Pearl sure, but in real prints this does not seem to matter - perhaps with very high key images. I've measured the SR blacks as being slightly lower than those on FAP! This is with unsprayed prints - reputedly Hahnemuehle have a spray that magically darkens their blacks to unheard of levels but we're yet to see this in action.

Exciting times - these new printing options open up new possibilities.

Doug Dolde
4-May-2006, 19:21
I had a 16x20 print made on Silver Rag by WCI (since I can't find any sheet paper yet). It came out great. Matted and framed it today it's on my wall now.

This one: www.painted-with-light.com/H24_IMAGE_PAGE.html (http://www.painted-with-light.com/H24_IMAGE_PAGE.html)

Brett Deacon
4-May-2006, 21:43
Neil, I got my roll of Silver Rag from Digital Art Supplies, found here:

http://www.digitalartsupplies.com/

I also recommend Inkjetart, found here:

http://www.inkjetart.com/index.php

Brett

Tim Hyde
5-May-2006, 04:23
Brett-

If you don't dry mount, how do you mount your prints, especially the large ones? Scotch or spray glue backing? Hinge mount? How do others mount their Museo SR prints? Thanks.

Brett Deacon
5-May-2006, 09:22
Tim, I've been hinge mounting my prints. I have not had to dry mount because up until now none of my prints have been bigger than 12x18 or 12x32 for panoramic images. Now that my drum scanner has arrived and I'm salivating at the images on my monitor I suspect very large images and dry mounting will follow soon. That said, I suspect that Silver Rag would not require dry mounting unless printed very large. Does anyone else have experience with mounting large Silver Rag prints who can speak to the necessity of dry mounting at specific sizes?

Martin Miller
5-May-2006, 14:27
A voice of restraint concerning the Silver Rag euphoria. For b&w prints Silver Rag is the paper we (digital printers) have all been waiting for: minimal differential gloss, undetectable bronzing, stunning blacks, and 100% rag paper. (All of my comments here pertain to the K3 inks.) However, I have found the color gamut (using the K3 Silver Rag profile on the Crane site) to be far short of of that available with Epson Premium Glossy or even Premium Semimatte paper.

Here's how I came to that conclusion. In checking the gamuts of other papers I had made up color-patch target files consisting of a matrix of 125 separate color patches on a page, 5 across and 25 down. I created a layer in Photoshop for each patch so that I could assign it a color using the Color Picker dialog. Each row is assigned a particular hue and a set of Saturation values of 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100%. I incremented the Hue values by 5 as I changed rows. It takes three such files to cover the entire Hue/Saturation spectrum. All this is for a value of Brightness of 100%. I then created additional sets of files for Brightnes values of 20, 40, 60, 80, and 100% for a total of 15 files.

In viewing these color patch files in Photoshop I used the soft proofing feature and selected the Crane profile to see approximately how the screen colors would print. If you then turn on the Gamut Warning (Shift+Ctrl+Y), the colors that are out-of-gamut turn gray. It was shocking to see how many color patches went gray at 100% Brightness. Things improve for lower values of Brightness.

You can do this for yourself without ever purchasing either a K3 printer or Silver Rag paper by simply downloading the profiles from Crane and comparing the result with profiles made by Bill Atkinson for the Epson RC photo papers. (Note that Bill's CV1 profile achieves the widest gamut by far compared to the others in his "bouquet of profiles".) Pick one of your images with high brightness and saturation.

For my color work I select my own colors so the fullest gamut possible is desirable. It may well be that the Silver Rag color gamut is sufficient to give good results for images with typical low-saturation colors found in nature, but if you are hoping for the same results as Premium Glossy for bright and highly saturated colors you will be disappointed. It may be that profiles leading to greater gamuts will be forthcoming, but for now I will stick with Premium Glossy.

Kerey
5-May-2006, 19:37
Interesting comments, Martin.

I did have a third image printed along with those already mentioned, this one only on Silver Rag. The image contains three yellow flowers in full sunlight against a blue sky and mountainscape. The sky grades strongly from left to right: very dark blue to medium blue. It was apparently too much for some step in the process... there are three VERY distinct breaks in tonality in the sky portion. I had the image printed months ago by a local lab (not sure what paper they used, but it was on an Epson 9600), w/o such banding.

My impression from reading previous posts was that blues in particular were perhaps better rendered using inkjets versus the Chromira. Is this banding problem one of gamut limitations, or simply due to a non-continuous tone printing process? I had some major gamut warnings when soft proofing this image using WCI's 'chromira profile', so I went w/ the SR instead (hardly any warnings). I suppose my next step is to send it off again just to see, this time to the Chromira...

Kerey

Jeremy_D
5-May-2006, 23:05
Soft proofs, especially when using canned profiles, apparently do not tell an accurate story in this case. You simply can not evaluate a paper in any sensible way without making some real prints. And the crane profiles I have seen just aren't that good - same as any other canned profile I've come across.

I've made custom profiles using K3 inks and Profilemaker and find the gamut is as large (in volume terms) as almost anything apart from Pictoric High Gloss White Film - and even there, we are talking only a percent or two extra volume. PGHGWF is the media I've found most able to cope with saturated colour using the K3 inks.

As a rule, saturated blues are a problem for inkjets, not light based printers - logically, as inkjets don't have blue inks. For example, the gamut of a lamda with metallic paper extends much further into blues than any inkjet, even the canon dye based inkjets which have about the largest measurable gamut out there.

The gamut warning in Photoshop is notoriously inaccurate and I would take it's information (ie the colours it turns grey) with a very big pinch of salt. The soft proof functions are much better, but still no subsitute for real prints.

Martin Miller
6-May-2006, 11:13
Kerey, the banding problem in your blue skies is most probably due to imperfections in the icc profile. I didn't just look at my color patch files using the soft proof and gamut warning features but made prints of the files as well. I sometimes found visual discontinuities of hue, saturation, and brightness in the color patch prints, particularly at the bright, saturated end of the scale. These were most often in the patches that Photoshop said were out of gamut but not exclusively.

The color patch prints confirm the wider gamut of Epson Premium Glossy and Semimatte papers with the K3 inks and Bill Atkinson CV1 profiles) over Silver Rag (with K3 inks and Crane profile). I was frankly surprised at this because I had seen web-published gamut plots for another new-generation paper (da Vinci Glossy paper, http://www.chaudigital.com/news/index.php) which claimed a better gamut than for "premium glossy" papers. When I looked at the web-published plots again, I noticed that they were only given for lumiunance values of 50% and lower. It's at the high end of the luminance scale where I found the Silver Rag to fall short. Again, my hope is that better Silver Rag profiles will appear soon. I assume that Bill Atkinson is at work on them now. My tests may well not reflect Silver Rag's full potential in the color arena because of possible limitations in the Crane profile. I hope so. I would like to stock only one paper!

Greg Miller
9-May-2006, 12:12
" Is this banding problem one of gamut limitations, or simply due to a non-continuous tone printing process?"

With very little information to work with, one possibility is this was caused by the combination of having out of gamut colors in the sky and the use of "relative colorimetric" as the rendering intent. This combination can cause the effect that you describe by pushing many out of gamut colors to the (same) nearest in gamut color on the edge of the color space curve.

QT Luong
7-Sep-2006, 11:05
The new gamutvision.com from Norm Koren should be a great tool for those profile-based comparisons.

Howard Slavitt
7-Sep-2006, 11:36
Does anyone have a recommendation for where to get good custom profiles made for the Crane Silver Rag and K3 inks? I'm inclined to try Andrew Rodney (aka the digital dog) next. He apparently uses Bill Atkinson's 4,000 patches. Thanks, Howard

chris jordan
7-Sep-2006, 11:56
Hi guys, I think much of the gamut issue has to do with bad profiles, not with the actual gamut that these papers will print. I have seen lots of profiles for Crane, with various different choices being made about gamut mapping. The Crane profile is pretty bad in terms of gamut, as well as its Dmax. For some reason, Crane clipped the Dmax way off on its profile; much better blacks can be achieved with a better profile

The Hahnemule Fine Art Pearl paper is better all around-- much better white point (the Crane is quite yellow), and Hahne's profile available on their website is also better than Crane's. But the Hahne profile also clips the blacks a lot.

There is a profile available that doesn't clip the blacks, but it is terrible over the rest of the range. That is the profile you can download from the LexJet website, for their version of the paper. What I do is use the Hahne profile, but with the LexJet profile laid over the top as a layer. I use the Advanced Blending Mode sliders to pull the LexJet profile out of everywhere except the darkest blacks. That combo gives a gorgeous print-- super dark blacks and accurate color and wide gamut.

If anyone is finding a C print that makes the Hahne print look flat by comparison, it's because the Hahne print is not made properly. The Hahne paper, with a good profile, produces richer colors than any other photographic process can, and I have heard that its Dmax is the darkest Dmax of any photographic process ever, including any B&W paper ever made. I don't have the equipment or the gumption to verify that, but I can tell you that I am making prints with insane blacks, and detail right down to the very bottom.

Bruce Watson
7-Sep-2006, 12:10
Where are people getting the Museo Silver Rag? I'm interested and would like to try it out, but I don't know where to order.
http://www.shadesofpaper.com/

Jim Doyle has it in rolls and sheets (home page says he out of one sheet size). Jim's a great guy and on top of his game. Outstanding service.

Jim also carries the Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl and Innova F-type Gloss if you want to try them.

Doug Dolde
7-Sep-2006, 12:20
Anyone read the rather negative article on Crane Silver Rag on Reichmann's site? My experience with it on the R2400 has been very good but I have no traditional prints to compare it to.

http://luminous-landscape.com/essays/surface-reflections.shtml

Howard Slavitt
7-Sep-2006, 16:08
The reason why the Crane Silver Rag is much yellower than the Innova or Hahnemuehle papers is because there are no optical brighteners in it at all. Both the Innova and Hahnemuehle have optical brighteners in the bases of the papers (which is much less of a problem than when they're in the coatings), the Hahnemuhele more than the Innova. I read the article on Reichman's site trashing the texture of Crane Museo -- I agree with him about 40%. I agree that I don't really like the Innova texture -- but for me the benefits of the Crane paper outweigh the stipling, reflection problem with its texture. I see it as an issue, one of two downsides to the paper (the other being the yellow base), neither of which outweigh the paper's tremendous benefits. BTW, one positive to the yellowish cast is that it tends to make all the colors look more saturated, IMHO. For landscapes, it works great; wouldn't work as well for color portraits. . . Although for black and white prints it gives a beautiful warm/brown tone that works great with portraits. Can anyone recommend a good source for a custom profile for the Silver Rag with K3 inks? . . . Had one bad experience, and am trying to avoid another.