Brilliant Papers from Calumet

My thoughts on two papers from the Calumet Brilliant Papers range.

Brilliant Museum Printing Papers from Calumet

As I CONSTANTLY demonstrate to individuals and groups during workshops and 1to1 tuition days, printing is so damned easy it’s ridiculous.  Provided you get all your “ducks in a row” – and that’s not the hardest thing in the world to do, considering you’ve only got 3 bloody ducks!

How hard can it be???

Notwithstanding the necessity for an accurate monitor profile (duck number 1), the paper and its profile, or colour space if you like, form the back-bone of both “soft-proof” and the final print that spews forth from your printer – they’re ducks 2 and 3 respectively.

When getting someone on the “straight and narrow path to print righteousness” I always find it best practice to make them stick to one paper until they are super-familiar with the process, and begin to appreciate the fact that paper choice is the final step in the creative process.

I never want to confuse folk with custom profiles either – if I can get them onto a paper that comes supplied with a reliable OEM profile which includes the relevant MEDIA SETTINGS for the printer (these are crucial) then my work is done.

One paper with a very accurate OEM profile that has media settings as part of the profile name is Permajet Oyster 271.  A cracking paper for general purpose printing, it’s finish suits most images, and it’s still my go-to paper for prints of general wildlife and natural history subjects.

But it doesn’t suit everything, and landscapes, seascapes, and other styles of fine art imagery are the sorts of images that spring to mind.  It’s paper-white is a little on the cool side for starters – so printing a warm tone image to it increases your soft-proof workload for starters.

So I’m always trying different papers so that I can recommend them to my clients,  but no matter how good I find them, I’ll rarely recommend them if the supplied OEM profile is crap.  With the profiling gear I use I could get a workable custom profile for toilet paper if I had to, but telling someone new to printing that they need to:

• Spend £1500 on the gear
• Learn how to use what looks like the most scary software GUI on the planet
• Waste 1 or 2 sheets of paper and ink printing the test charts (it’s not a waste really but that’s how they’d see it).

isn’t a real option.

But now I’m in love with two papers from Calumet and their Brilliant Papers Museum range.  They are:

• Brilliant Papers Museum Satin Matte Natural

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  Brilliant Papers Museum Inkjet Paper – Satin Matte Natural

• Brilliant Papers Museum Silver Gloss Natural

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  Brilliant Papers Museum Inkjet Paper – SilverGloss Natural

Both these papers, in my opinion, are up there with the very best of them.  And, while they cost – size for size – twice as much as something like Permajet Oyster; they are both far more than twice as beneficial to the easy production of fine art landscapes and other images that require a bit more from the printer paper to add the final touch.

I’ve used both papers on the Epson R3000 with the Epson ink set, and on my Epson 4800 that carries a Lyson ink set, and all I can say is that I’m more than impressed, and have no trouble in recommending you give them a go.

On the Epson R3000 I used the “canned profiles” downloadable from Brilliant Papers website HERE  but you need to understand that Brilliant have not exactly been sensible here and have omitted to give you any indication of correct media settings.

I’ve actually been using media settings of WCRW (water colour radiant white) for the Satin Matte Natural on the R3000 and TFAP (textured fine art paper) on the 4800.

For the Silver Gloss Natural the media settings for both printers have been UPPPL (ultra premium photo paper lustre) and results have been superb.

Just in case you don’t understand why media settings need to be set correctly, different papers require, amongst other things, different inking levels from the print head – too much ink and the print will look dark, too little and it’ll look pale and washed out.  There is also the little matter of what’s called “dot gain”.  Some papers have a hard glossy surface, others a more rough and porous one. A nozzle droplet of a particular size might be fine on a gloss paper, but that same size droplet on a fine art rag paper might well ‘bleed’ and spread out like it was on blotting paper.  This bleeding, or dot gain, leads to a reduction in sharpness of fine detail.

So, media settings are important – they ain’t there for the hell of it you know!

The “canned” profiles plot for the Epson R3000 using MK ink for Satin Matte Natural and PK ink for the Silver Gloss Natural (sRGB included for comparison):

Click to enlarge

And for the 4800:

Click to enlarge

I swapped the plot colours around by mistake – my bad!

I always used to like the look of images printed on Permajets Fine Art Museum 310, but 90% of the time I felt the texture somehow visually ‘got in the way’.

The texture of Brilliant Papers Museum Satin Matte Natural is not quite so pronounced which means I like it better!

In practical terms the colour space of the paper, though ever so slightly smaller than the Permajet Museum paper, does give you slightly deeper blacks and that tiny bit of extra shadow detail clarity.  All in all, a very good go-to paper, especially for the more monochromatic image such as:

“The Portal”

The Brilliant Papers Silver Gloss Natural.  I find it difficult to actually describe the finish as “gloss” – it’s more like a very fine grained lustre to be honest.

And the difference between the two papers?  Well, the Silver Gloss just has that little extra contrast in the medium and darker midtones – it’s a bit like adding 8 or 10 points of clarity to an image inside of the Lightroom Dev module.  I’d definitely consider this a great paper for landscape and fine art imagery that contains just that little bit more in terms of colour variation and saturation:

“Stepping Stones to Oblivion”

All in all two very nice papers from the Brilliant Papers range that will be seeing regular use both in my own work, and in my workshops and tuition days; though not exactly budget-priced papers they’re no where near as pricey as some – plus, don’t you think your images are worth it?

And just in case you were wondering; I too was quite surprised at just how well matched the Brilliant canned profiles for the 4800 worked out on my Lyson ink set! I’ve written custom profiles for both of these papers, and there is generally so little difference between the custom and Brilliant profiles (which are really intended for the Epson ink set) that I can’t tell the difference between the prints I’ve done so far – and I’ve done a few!

Though for my own printing I’ll always use my custom icc profiles.

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