Paper Chase - Ilford Galerie Gold Fibre Silk

It has taken a little longer, but Ilford have now joined the fibre-based look-alike brigade with the launch of Galerie Gold Fibre Silk. With its sumptuous livery of purple and black, trimmed with gold, it certainly looks the part of a highquality, premium product and although we are looking at the generic rise of baryta-coated papers, we are giving the Ilford product the same consideration as we have given all its rivals.

Galerie Gold Fibre Silk is a 310gsm material with a baryta coating, intended to simulate the surface and print feel obtained with a gloss, air-dried, silver halide media – the very roots of Ilford’s history in fact! It most certainly accomplishes this aim and the beautifully produced press pack (complete with white gloves!) contained some gorgeous, lustrous images, each imitating a conventional toning treatment of a silver halide paper. The media also remained perfectly flat through the Epson 3800 printer something that not all of its rivals could accomplish. It even smelled like a silver halide paper which was a bit spooky!

Base Properties

The media is 310gsm with a measured calliper of 320 microns. In natural north daylight it looks just a little creamy and there was no evidence of optical brighteners in either the UV-booth or from the spectral trace, indeed the spectral trace was almost perfectly flat from 360 to 690nm. The base paper measured a half point or so to the blue-magenta side of perfect neutral. The base fibre composition of the material is not disclosed in the literature, so we suspect that it is not cotton rag (which people would boast about) more likely an alpha cellulose.

Colour Performance

The media behaved in a similar way to other baryta-coated papers. The neutrality of the base delivers extremely accurate skin tones. The canned profile (downloaded from Ilford) produced slight desaturation all around the gamut and this was also true of the skin tones. The hue of the skin tones was a minute fraction rotated towards magenta but nothing that the eye could detect. The landscape tones were extremely good, a result of this material’s ability to hold deep blacks and dark tones. The average error of the profile across the Macbeth swatches was 5.9ΔE Lab/3.15 ΔE2000, a good result for a canned profile on our Epson 3800 test-bed (using Photo Black ink, of course).

The gamut volume was 828,192. This was from Ilford’s 288- swatch profile target and is bound to be a little lower than we could achieve with our own profiling target on more than twice that number of swatches. It is, however, in the right ball-park in comparison to its competitors. The Granger Chart was smooth over the entire gamut and there was no sign of bronzing or differential gloss. The printed surface is relatively fragile and needs to be handled with a little care. It seemed to be touch dry as it emerged from the printer.

Monochrome Performance

As you might expect, Ilford place great store by the monochrome performance of this media. It measures up well to silver halide!

Metamerism in the neutral greys was typically low for this type of coating and Epson UltraChrome K3 at 1.5 ΔE Lab (D65 to Tungsten on 50% grey). The Dmax was 2.17. The grey linearity curve was straight all the way down to the deepest shadows, which blocked at about 15 RGB points and a lightness value of 5.8% with this profile. The profile mapped the greys directly to the white point and so everything looked very clean and neutral.

Digital Toning

Ilford publish a method for digitally toning, by modifying the print RGB values in Photoshop before printing in colour. The prints provided in the press pack were truly impressive but we doubt they were reproduced by exactly following their method, as printed in the literature. The basis of the method is to set a coloured layer above the image layer and set it to ‘overlay’ in the blending modes. This has the effect of setting all the image to the hue value of the colour layer. When we attempted this we found a much bigger difference in our sepia and gold tone attempts than the sample prints. This was borne out when we measured their actual prints. The sample prints were only 4° different in hue whereas we observed twice that difference when following the instructions. The values should therefore be considered as starting points and some careful experimentation will be needed to exactly mimic the beauty of a gold-toned print. We wonder if a better technique would be to use a Pantone colour on a solid colour adjustment layer to achieve consistency. No instructions are given as to the RGB colour space to translate a monochrome into, ahead of digital toning, we got quite different effects using either sRGB or Adobe RGB. Using overlay as the blending mode increases the average luminance of our test image by at least 11 RGB points and so adjustment of the tone range is a must when you apply this method. Again, treat the printed values as a starting point.

DIGITAL TONING

This is the method published by Ilford for re-creating the effects of conventional silver halide toners. Our tests did not mimic the samples provided by Ilford and were not as close as the Ilford samples for the sepia and gold tone effects – the Ilford prints were superior.

1. Select the image to be toned.

2. Open the image.

3. Save the image with a new name.

4. Make sure that the image mode is set for RGB.

5. Create a new empty layer.

6. Using the colour picker enter the following values: Red Green Blue

1. Sepia 215 175 110
2. Blue 20 120 180
3. Gold 250 145 55
4. Neutral – No Overlay Required
5. Cool 150 150 175
6. Warm 180 170 150

7. Fill the empty layer with this colour selection.

8. In the layer properties box select Overlay.

9. You now have a quick-toned Image and can now either:

a. Flatten the layers and make overall adjustments in various parameters.

b. Make adjustments to either the image or colour layer until you have the variant that you prefer.

10. Save and print your new ‘digital toned’ image on GALERIE Gold Fibre Silk.

Overall

There has been a tendency for all the manufacturers of fibre-base look-alikes to emphasise the properties of their monochrome reproduction. This is undoubtedly justified but we have consistently found that these media are superb allround performers and Ilford Gold Fibre Silk is no exception. If anything makes this offering stand out from its rivals it is the flawless surface finish, I suppose we could expect nothing less from the company with probably the greatest experience in applying baryta coatings over the last two centuries!

Photo Quote: The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing. - Publilius Syrus