Inkjet Printing, Papers and Color Profiles
Ok, now to get to the essence of what I want to talk about in this post. The graph to the right is taken from Chromix's Color Think Pro software and it represents the various color spaces in use today, From Largest to smallest
ProPhoto RGB
Adobe RGB
Mac's DCI-P3
sRGB
I will come back to the Eizo CG318-4k monitor
Now in the next couple of graphs, I set out to find what is the best inkjet paper to use for printing color as well as black and white prints. This took me on a project to also compare the color space of my monitor, what advances have manufactures made to monitors and what about service bureaus.
I have owned ColorByte's ImagePrint software for a while. It is a stand alone Raster Image Processor (RIP) designed to convert image data easily interpreted by the printer. As such, Color Bytes develops color and black and white icc profiles for virtually every printable paper on the market and the profiles are of very high quality. To assist in the papers to select for my analysis, I first of all used this very good web site from Freestyle Photographic Supplies with their Inkjet Paper Comparisons, Ratings and Reviews. There are two notable exclusions from their list, Moab and Breathing Color.
Another source was Mark Segal's article at Luminous Landscape (behind their paywall) called "What's the Gold Standard of Inkjet Papers? From these and other sources I chose to compare:
Ilford Prestige Gold Fiber Glossy
Hahnemuhle Fine Art Baryla
Canon Photo Rag High Gloss
Breathing Color, Vibrance having used this paper a lot.
I have listed the papers based on their ranking results on the graph below, the Ilford Prestige with the largest color space and Breathing Color the smallest of this group, However, all are very tightly together and will make great prints.
Now I find this graph to be very important as it compares the color space of:
The Eizo CG318-4K monitor, which I think is the best of the new 4K monitors (and the only one I could find an icc profile of),
The Adobe RGB color space, my
NEC PA271W as developed from NEC's SpectraView software and
Ilford's Gold Fiber Glossy
In reading Less Walkling's articles he suggests that one should set their monitors calibrated color space to sRGB. I personally think that doing so greatly increases the problems with working with prints. If I were the use the color profile for the Ilford Gold Fiber Glossy for the paper and have a monitor set to sRGB, there would be hugh areas of color that would be printed that I did not see on the monitor. As it is, even with my wide color space of my NEC monitor, there are still area's in the yellow/orange and blue portions of the paper color space that will be beyond the color space of my monitor.
I must say that the updated changes to the Visual Composer that I use to create these blogs has become a pain in the neck.....Now the two graps, the first one compares the two satin papers of Canon, the best and Ilford Gold Fiber Silk. Very tight.
The second one looks at the color space, from biggest to smallest as follows
Ilford Gold Fiber Glossy
a popular printing service's satin profile
a popular printing service's metallic (aluminum board) profile
a different, even more well known printing service's standard profile (I was surprised at how small this was)
and the CMYK profile of the printer I have been using for making calendars.
I think I am going to end this discussion here. In one of my next posts I will get into some thoughts on setting up the printing work flow as well as a work flow for dealing with outside printing services. When working with an outside printing service, one should treat them the same way as designing and proofing printing on ones own printer. For example, using Uwe's image above, sending it to the printer, recording what changes you had to make to get it the way you want it, and then saving those settings and/or creating an action that to apply to future prints.