Paper Chase - The Baryta Phenomenon

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The ‘Look’

This area is problematic for a reviewer because you cannot put meaningful numbers on it and can find yourself drifting into subjective pronouncements. The creaminess or blueness we can at least measure and we have shown the size of the shift away from pure neutral. This does not, though, make one paper better than another, you have to try a few sheets, make a few prints and decide. The lift produced by the brighteners can be measured though, and if you are wary of OBAs then you should go for the warm variants or one of the lower lift papers tabled right.

To judge the papers visually we set them out on a table and viewed them so that we could not see or tell which was which, and then tested ourselves to see if we could unerringly identify a paper for a particular characteristic. We found that the Harmon Gloss had the smoothest surface and we could pick it from the group every time. The Ilford Gold Fibre Silk has a particular sheen when viewed obliquely and could always be picked out. Fuji Baryte and Fotospeed Platinum were characterised by the most matte finish in the unprinted white areas and by a linear marking of the coating as viewed in the dark colours. This was a signature from the slurry rollers.

None of the above variations caused us to prefer one material over another.

If you like weight in your paper, the heaviest were Permajet Fibre Base Royal, Epson Traditional Photo Paper and Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta. The thickest was Hahnemühle PhotoRag Pearl.

ABOVE: A simplified representation of where the various papers lie in the warm-to-coolness scale. Ilford Gallerie Gold sits in the middle. The 'lift above base' is the difference between the overall luminance of the white and the luminance measured at 440nm, the wavelength at which there is the most OBA activity.

This is essentially the same data but plotted on the Lab space. The 'repeatability' cluster of data shows that the repeatability of the instrumentation is about the size of the marker points, and that differences on the graph are real, either due to batch differences or different fomulations. The D50 crosses show that there is a rotation of the points around the neutral axis from D65 but that the differences between D65 and D50 measurements are relatively small. Pure neutral at D65 lies at the '0, 0' origin of the graph.

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Photo Quote: Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment. - Ansel Adams