Paper Chase - Ilford Galerie - page 2

Galerie Professional Smooth Gloss Paper and Smooth Pearl Paper

This is a gloss media and shares the 280gsm with its Smooth Pearl sibling along with a seemingly identical coating. The similarities in the papers are so striking as to be worth relating the statistics - if we had not checked we might have thought we had put the same specimen through the spectro twice!

Overall then you can mix and match the three surfaces, assured that prints will look absolutely identical apart from the surface finish – quite an achievement in coating consistency, profiling and indeed 3800 printing.

By way of example the hue errors are superimposed from High Gloss, Gloss and Pearl showing the considerable consistency of performance across the range.

Once again the three data sets are superimposed, this time for flesh tone errors.

Smooth Fine Art Paper

There are three variants in the Ilford range, Smooth Fine Art Paper (190gsm) and Smooth Fine Art Weave (210gsm) and Smooth Fine Art Matte (310gsm). We only had test samples of first a 190gsm, 100% rag, acid free and OBS-free media, the two others are available through the Ilford Studio range as roll form.

The media is just on the cream side of neutral with a lightly textured surface. It is too thin for true giclée work, which ordinarily calls for 250gsm as a minimum weight. On test it performed consistently with other fine art media, good colour accuracy especially in the skin tones, depressed Dmax and a lower gamut volume than the gloss and lustre papers. The average error across the Macbeth Chart was 6.9 Lab ΔE/3.2ΔE2000. The flesh tones were mapped to the base neutral and so came in at an excellent 2.8ΔE2000 average error. Dmax was 1.56 and metamerism was 1.5 Lab points. The grey linearity curve bottomed out at 19% brightness and the shadows blocked at a slightly high 25 RGB points.

Smooth Heavyweight Matte paper

This is a double-sided 200gsm media. The profile was built using Single Weight Matte Paper as the Epson media setting, which limited us to 720dpi in the driver. As with other media of this type the colour accuracy was down on its more expensive siblings. The average errors were 9.2 Lab ΔE/4.7ΔE2000. The Dmax was 1.43 but the metamerism was surprisingly low at 0.4 Lab points. The Granger chart was a little less smooth than those of its companions. Overall though the test print was visually very similar to the more expensive offerings and this paper would act as good proofing media ahead of investing in a large fine art print.

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Photo Quote: What I feel is that the picture-taking process, anyway a greater part of it, is an intuitive thing. You can't go out and logically plan a picture, but when you come back, reason then takes over and verifies or rejects whatever you've done. So that's why I say that reason and intuition are not in conflict--they strengthen each other. - Wynn Bullock