Galerie FB grade 2 has indeed been discontinued

[Oren Grad]

Following up on discussion at Photrio and in the "Quality Papers" thread here I asked Ilford/Harman about this, received the following this morning:

Hello Oren,

Thank you for your enquiry.

I can confirm that Galerie Grade 2 has been discontinued and is no longer available.

Kind regards,
Customer Service
Harman technology Ltd.

[Corran]

Really disappointed to hear this. Not only because I have grown to really love Galerie G2 this past year but also because of all the companies in the film/darkroom space, I trusted Ilford the most to keep manufacturing the products they still had on the production lines. Talking to reps they seemed the most in-tune with the film and darkroom paper users and it this is a bit of a betrayal of that trust I felt.

Now I have to re-calibrate my process that worked perfectly for contact printing on G2 papers, and not only that, worry that Galerie in its entirety will disappear.

I suppose VC papers are just dominating the market. It's not that I dislike them, but I feel like there's a bit more life in the graded papers, especially in the highlight area. The shoulder of Ilford's Warmtone makes printing images with delicate highlights difficult (think water flowing / waterfalls as I have been doing a lot of lately), whereas Galerie just keeps all of those tonalities nicely rendered in the upper zones. The nice subtle tone of Galerie was also nice, compared to the other offerings.

Oh well, life moves on I guess.

[Drew Wiley]

I get better results in the highlights with MGWT than Galerie. But it takes some experience to understand how to tweak the different emulsion layers appropriately. In fact, I'm reprinting with ease older negatives that were difficult with any graded paper, including Galerie. Each variety of VC is really a bit different in this respect, and one shoe does not fit all subject matter. There's still quite a bit of smaller sizes of Galerie Gr 2 at the local camera store, but I'm hesitant to buy any because it's so old - really old. They should just bargain price the whole lot of it out the door and be done with it. I'm not going to gamble top buck.