New Red River paper: Palo Duro Smooth Rag

[Mark D Segal]

Canon doesn't make papers. Like many companies selling papers, they have them manufactured by third parties and participate in designing the specifications they want - often variants of other papers already in existence. Sometimes the differences are small enough that the same profiles can be used for different brands coming from the same mill. Mitsubishi does manufacture inkjet paper and it is likely that Canon procures some of its brands from them.

[Ernst Dinkla]

Mearusssia's mention of Mitsubishi reminds me of when I bought my Canon ipF printer. The Canon guys in Oz gave me a whole bunch of Mitsubishi profiles (to use with Canon papers?). I don't really know why - were the profiles to be used on Canon papers? I never was able to find "Mitsubishi" branded paper for retail sale.

Pictorico is a label of Mitsubishi. On the Photokina there is always a booth of Mitsubishi, there are sample books for both Mitsubishi and Pictorico qualities. It is like Felix Schoeller a big supplier of RC and plain inkjet papers to other distributors that put their label on the boxes or might even convert big rolls to the sizes needed, Felix Schoeller also has a wider portfolio in art papers and does coating for other mills too. Like Sihl does the coating for Hahnemühle but also has its own catalog of inkjet papers. Hahnemüh;e buys some qualities from Felix Schoeller too. Yes some distributors talk, the more when you ask them the right questions.

Met vriendelijke groet, Ernst

http://www.pigment-print.com/spectralplots/spectrumviz_1.htm
March 2017 update, 750+ inkjet media white spectral plots

[dasuess]

As promised, here are my first impressions of the new RR Palo Duo Smooth Rag paper.

I selected on image (a sunset) to print on RR PDSR, RR Aurora Art Natural and Moab Estrada Rag 300. This image was shot on a Nikon Df, processed in LR with final, mostly local adjustments, done in PS. For printing I transferred the TIFF from LR to Epson Print Layout (using an Edit In preset). The settings for all the prints were identical with the exception of the ICC profile where I used the one supplied by the Red River and Moab. For all of the papers I set the Media Type to Hot Press Natural.

Looking at the papers, the base color looks the same. In terms of texture the PDSR is the smoothest, then the AAN, then the Entrada which has a more pronounced texture that the other two papers, but not near as much as RR Palo Duro Etching.

The prints appear to be very similar, but the PDSR and Entrada have a bit more "pop" than the AAN. The PDSR has just a bit more orange bias just as Mark noted in his review of the PDE paper. I think I could be happy with any of these papers for the landscape prints that I make.

This is just my first, unscientific, impression of how PDSR stacks up against these other papers that I have used.

[Mark D Segal]

Useful observations, thanks. You may also want to try a black and white photo having good tonal range (good shadow detail) to detect what differences their maybe in maximum black and shadow detail rendition, if any.

Is the Media Type setting you used the one recommended by the profile supplier for all three papers?

I'm curious to better understand a couple of things about your work flow: what kind of local adjustments are you doing in Photoshop that you find you cannot do in Lightroom, and why print from the Epson Layout Utility, why not just print from Lightroom once you have the final version back there?

[dasuess]

Useful observations, thanks. You may also want to try a black and white photo having good tonal range (good shadow detail) to detect what differences their maybe in maximum black and shadow detail rendition, if any.

Is the Media Type setting you used the one recommended by the profile supplier for all three papers?

I'm curious to better understand a couple of things about your work flow: what kind of local adjustments are you doing in Photoshop that you find you cannot do in Lightroom, and why print from the Epson Layout Utility, why not just print from Lightroom once you have the final version back there?

Can’t pull a fast one on you, Mark. For both PDSR and Entrada the mfg recommendstion for media type id HPN and UPPM for AAN, but it seems to me that RR once recommended HPN for AAN.

Regarding using EPL from LR for printing, I am just trying to have a standard wokflow for printing. I have very recently been looking at ABW mode for B&W printing and EPL lets you preview the ABW tone settings. EPL has some issues that will cause me to not use it for color - cannot set platen gap and ink load; however, these may be possibly set internally by media type? Also, margins are off by about 1/16 inch, something I have noticed when printing greeting cards from Pages (I am on a Macbook Pro). Do mot see this from LR.

I use PS for local adjustments such as contrast, dodge/burn, etc. I can do these much better in PS than LR. The TIFF returned from PS is my master file from which I print or export for web posts, gretting cards, etc.

Hopefully I did not muddy up the originsl intent of giving my impression of PDSR compared to some similar papers I use.


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[Mark D Segal]

No, nothing muddied-up; I was just curious about the workflow. Everyone has their preferences and to some extent depends on exactly what one is doing.

In my case, I find it easier and more effective/efficient to do everything from start to finish in Lr, and reserve Photoshop only for things that Lr simply can't do, but Ps can. I wouldn't have said that some years ago before Lr developed soft-proofing, but since then it's just about Lr all the way. Major exception for my work digitizing colour negatives (whether by scanner or by camera) where SilverFast plays the preponderant role, but even those files end-up in Lr for finishing and printing.

Turning back to the main subject, of course it is best to use the Media Type that the profile is predicated on. So you may find your AAN result to come out more accurately using the UPPM Media Type (if that's the one the profile maker used) rather than HPN, but that's easily discernible if you try a print from each and compare.