Digital BW, The Print

Wolf,

You wrote:

>... several weeks ...prints, on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308 and
>William Turner, ...
> The new print was considerably colder in tone, ...
> the older prints brownish in tone by comparison. ...

As far as I know, all ink/paper combinations shift color to some degree.
When I test paper and inks, I note both the fading and warming.  In my view,
with pigmented quads, the warming is the more visible effect, and I don't
like it.

Of course, the warming might be caused by some air pollution or other
oxidizer, but light is what usually seems to cause the warming.

I don't correlate my tests to room display time, but the pattern in my fade
tests is that the warming is fastest during the first 100 hours in the
fader, and by 300 hours it has essentially stopped.

So, while the ink tone does stabilize, the warmth of the typical quad print
will end up about 8 (of 256) units warmer than it started.  This difference
is visible and, in my opinion, a problem with virtually all inks.  It just
shows up more with B&W due to our sensitivity to tone shifts in neutral
prints

In the FS-neutral midtone inks, which are also used in the VM-Sepia inkset,
I attempted to balance the inkset in a way that would avoid most of the
warming.  It will still change color somewhat, but much less (hopefully)
than the other inksets.

I assume I'll be getting feedback in coming months about the warming of the
FS-N inkset.  I will make changes to the formula as needed to compromise the
rates of change that might be induced by different oxidizers and on
different papers.  I test on EAM, but Hahnemuhle and Eclipse, both of which
appear to have coatings designed for pigments, should be close in their
performance.

Paul
http://www.PaulRoark.com