Liege and Concorde Rag on Epson 1200

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I got some of the above papers and played around with them last night on my 1200
using Epson inks. These papers have a lot of dot gain and problems with heavy
colors (e.g. black) bleeding so I tried the Film setting and playing around with
saturation and color intensity. My test image is a portrait photo taken in
bright sun with areas of deep black next to moderately saturated colors, and
more saturated colors in the out of focus background.

I gave up on the Liege pretty quickly because the surface fibers in the paper
tend to raise, yielding a kind of fuzzy light gray haze on the surface. If you
don't mind this, the paper can be made to work, but I don't like it personally.
The Concorde Rag surface stood up very well, although it is worth treating it
carefully for an hour or so until it completely dries so fluff doesn't rub off
the surface while it is still damp.

The Concorde Rag on Film setting, automatic color, all color settings flat works
pretty well, but is kind of washed out. Going up towards max saturation, and
increased CMY settings worked on my portrait test image up to about 10% color
increase with max saturation, then colors started bleeding at interfaces with
dark blacks and pretty saturated colors. One issue with the Concorde Rag on this
printer is that the ink doesn't dry instantly, so it migrates around in areas
with a lot of color/black. Printing out some images and comparing them to Epson
Photo Paper, the color looked very good, but subtle variations in the image were
largely lost, and interfaces between strongly different colors were a bit messed
up due to the colors migrating into each other.

Earlier I had tried a more limited set of tests with Lumijet papers, the Classic
Velour in particular seemed both a lot more forgiving, and kept higher
resolution. Looking at the papers under a loupe, it seems that the individual
printer ink dots can be seen on the Epson paper and on the Lumijet papers, but
not on the Concorde Rag where the dot gain spreads them out to blend with
neighboring dots. If the image was something like a digital painting, this might
be good, because it produces a very smooth image. For photos, however, at least
to my taste, too much detail and subtlety is lost.

Anyone have any better techniques?

Ralph


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