Print Quality and Matte Media

Hello all,

This is not so much a Photoshop question as just being about printing in general, but I’m sure the problem I’m seeing has been observed by others here. And perhaps the answer lies in how to best print from Photoshop to the media in question. My question is illustrated by the photo found at <http://ambress.com/gallery/matte_comparison.jpg>

In this photo of a lion, printing the image to a high-quality archival matte paper (either Epson Velvet Fine Art or Epson Ultrasmooth Fine Art) results in areas where fine detail is lost due to what I’d call "ink blocking". This is most obvious in the medium brown tones of the lion’s mane, yielding what I think of as just looking more "muddy". In contrast, printing to a harder surface matte in the form of Epson Matte Heavyweight (aka Premium Presentation Paper Matte) does not exhibit this behavior and significantly better image detail is found. While I did not print other photos for comparison to what I’ve shown here, what puzzles me is why I do not see such behavior with all color photos printed to the heavier, softer matte papers.

It seems that I generally observe the best results where the image details are defined by a broader change in colors versus a more gradual change. It may also be that a certain color range is more likely to do this than others, raising a question of whether this is an issue of gamut…both of the media and paper, and yet not really having a sufficient understanding of all this to even know if I’m on the right track.

For images that I might potentially sell, I favor the heavier archival matte papers although even the Epson Heavyweight Matte has a high lightfastness rating and typically provides excellent image quality. A co-worker has told me that he has frequently had problems with ink density on the Epson archival matte papers and has never been able to get results he is happy with. Given that I do obtain some very nice images in many cases, I can’t help but think that sometimes the color range and type of detail in an image may actually be more what should govern the choice of print media used? It is just frustrating to see how I can make one print that looks great on a particular media only to turn around and make another print that looks crummy by comparison, and yet really not perceive the types of images being printed as being all that different.

Any suggestions on what is going wrong here, or what I’m missing?

All my printing is done on an Epson R1800 using Epson media profiles and Epson inks, following the approach of letting Photoshop manage the colors and disabling ICM in the print driver, while selecting the same media in both the profile list and in the print driver dialog.

Thanks,

Daryl