Paper Chase - Hahnemuhle - The Art of Expression page 2

The ArtLine Paper Series

William Turner 190 and 310 ArtLine

This surface is available at two weights and is one of the most popular of the Hahnemühle offerings. It has a natural white, mould-made, 100% cotton rag base with quite a hard feel when handled. It does not contain optical brighteners. It performs well for the reproduction of watercolours. Along with the other materials, it performed better with the Hahnemühle profiles when set to Velvet Fine Art in the media dialogue of the Epson driver, WCRW was too yellow. The grey scale tonal cross-over was also reduced, with a much tighter pattern being created from a VFA media setting. This would have considerable bearing on the look of a monochrome print. Perversely the grey gradient was smoother with the WCRW setting, although the VFA setting produced slightly more shadow discrimination at the 20 RGB level.

Albrecht Dürer 210 ArtLine

With a wonderfully evocative name, this is mouldmade paper utilising 50% cotton rag. Hahnemühle quotes it as being most suitable for the reproduction of watercolour acrylics and oil art works. It has quite a textured surface in a natural white with no OBAs. The rear surface is also characteristic and seems to reveal the ‘chains’ of the mould-making process. The comments about William Turner in terms of colour rendition apply also to this media. At 210gsm it is quite a light material, below Fine Art Trade Guild standards for limited edition prints, for example.

White Etching 268 ArtLine

This is a bright white media made with 25% cotton rag by the Fourdrinier process. It has a similar surface to German Etching but with additional brightness, created by OBA inclusion in the coating. Despite having brighteners, it produced some of the best data on skin tones and a very slightly higher Dmax than its companions, although do not buy on that basis – we are talking small variations around already good data here! The prints have a nice clean, open feel to them with the brighter base, which would make this a good paper for the monochrome enthusiast. There was no profile available for this media on the Hahnemühle website and so we used our own bespoke profile made with Photo Rag. We subsequently obtained more samples and made a bespoke profile. This produced even better

White Etching Satin 270 ArtLine

This is the same base as the White Etching but with an additional coating to create a fine silk sheen after ink has been printed onto the paper. The effect is to increase the Dmax and the gamut volume. The additional gamut is mainly created in the darker colours. The average colour error was 5.4 LabΔE/3.08ΔE2000 and also the lowest skin error we found in the test. The bespoke profile created a very smooth grey gradient in both this material and the White Etching material. This was a surface we liked a lot!

German Etching 310 ArtLine

This is a mould-made natural white paper with quite a smooth finish making it suitable for the production of etching-like prints. It is the smoothest of the ArtLine series and is optically brightened. Its heavier weight gives it a certain presence in the hand. As with its lighter companion (White Etching) it delivers very accurate skin tones.

Museum Etching 350 ArtLine

This is a mould-made natural white, OBA-free, 100% cotton rag media at a near-board weight of 350gsm. It oozes quality and is naturally quite a bright surface. This is a material that will be favoured by those wishing to create a ‘no-expense-spared’ limited edition print series. The colour audit statistics are good. This was the only material we carried out more than one profiling test on. The bespoke profile delivered the best statistics, the smoothest Granger Chart and a larger gamut volume than the Hahnemühle profiles using either WCRW or VFA settings. The metamerism was also lower with the bespoke profile at 1.4 ΔE probably due to the more tightly controlled neutrality of the 50% grey measurement point. The bespoke profile has slightly less discrimination in the shadows between 25 and 15 RGB points.

White Etching 268 ArtLine

White Etching Satin 270 ArtLine

German Etching 310 ArtLine

Museum Etching 350 ArtLine

Torchon 285 ArtLine

This is a bright white media with a rough undulating surface (some similar variants are entitled ‘mogul’ for reasons that will be obvious to skiers). It comes from 100% alpha cellulose base stock and is heavily whitened with OBAs. Its thickness has caused us problems with feeding into both printers and spectros in the past but the Epson 3800 coped OK. The audit data using the Hahnemühle profile was reasonably good and the print was clean and bright with quite a rich feel to it. When we have tested the media previously we obtained better colour data with bespoke profiling so there is a little more in the bank yet! If you want a rich, bright monochrome with a very characteristic surface, this might be a good place to start.

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Photo Quote: I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can! - Ansel Adams