Printing on Watercolour Paper

Still have not had a chance to fire up the printer.......but

I am using Cone pigment.
Spent a LOT of time creating a profile, it was not simple to get it
The packaging of the paper I use is different from the stuff jtoolman uses. I can't get the paper he uses in smooth finish to larger than A4.
Have used other watercolour paper with my settings ....."ouch!"
Printer settings will be a guide only so:
at normal settings colour was also washed out so I slowed the passes and it improved, wound the speed down 30% and added 20% ink and that was the starting point to tweak improvements.
The 3880 offers printer presets so that you can record each one you trial.....when you get a goodie don't discard the others...keep them and use them as a starting point if you try a new paper or if you get a new batch that is not behaving as expected because the paper DOES change from batch to batch, they are NOT all uniform in the way they respond to the ink.

Cheers

Just use hairspray, I can print on normal CD's with it. Watercolor paper requires 2 light coats.

Smile said:

Just use hairspray, I can print on normal CD's with it. Watercolor paper requires 2 light coats.

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Why use hairspray, its the pictures a person wants to be coating? How do you print on CD's with hairspray...and I don't wear makeup or anything when I print on watercolour so I'm certainly not going to be spraying my hair

I didn't have much luck with any watercolor paper paper when I tried. I had a pad of Canson paper (blue pad) and some Fabriano. Images looked no better than plain paper. Maybe I'm just expecting too much who knows.
I'm using an Epson R2000 with Precision Color inks, if anyone tested this combo with better results, i'd be curious to see what settings they were using, profile or not (I have a Colormunki Photo and a Datacolor 1005 here), etc.

After looking at Joe's show and tell videos again, I gave the watercolor papers another try tonight. This time around I loaded the paper from the rear, manual tray, and enabled the "reduce scraping" feature. I'm not sure why using the rear tray worked better than the regular paper feed, but it did.
Media setting for the canson was Watercolor paper radiant white, no color management, high speed on, and for the fabriano Plain Paper with quality at 3, no color management, high speed off. For both papers I did a one-page argyll profile. Gamut was roughly 40% more than my previous attempts (according to argyll's iccgamut). These paper may not be the best for all types of images, but i'm sure it will work out well for many. I'm pretty sure they are pretty long lasting too, being acid free papers.

It would be helpful to see scanned images of a standard test image as test prints from these various treatment methods.

3dogs said:

Why use hairspray,

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It coats the media so ink will stick to it.

3dogs said:

its the pictures a person wants to be coating?

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No the hairspray is for base coat you print on it, nothing to do with coating after you printed your photos.

3dogs said:

How do you print on CD's with hairspray...and I don't wear makeup or anything when I print on watercolour so I'm certainly not going to be spraying my hair

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Simple just take regullar CD non printable, coat it with hairspray one light coat. Print on it with your printer like on printable CD. Experiment with ink intensity as this requires far less ink due to the fact ink will be absorbed just very little. After printing coat the CD again this time with matte or gloss lacquer they sell for paint repair in auto stores etc.

You can not use any lacquer and just spray with hairspray after printing, but the result will be less durable.

Pardon my ignorance, but what is the purpose of using watercolor paper for inkjet printing? I would guess that it would be for two reasons. One would be the texture and fine-art appearance of the paper itself, and the other would be the nature of the paper in absorbing the ink and creating a "painterly" quality of the image that includes the ink spreading a bit into the fibers of the paper. The attempt might be to duplicate, in some measure, the "soft" quality of water colors and the usual lack of "hard edges" of the images. I might try it sometime in the future but the difficulty of getting enough color saturation is something I'll let others work out first!

fotofreak, I can think of two reasons.. the first being the cost. These papers are really inexpensive. The other one is archival properties (it's debatable). Some say that a paper with an inkjet receptive coating will not last as long as a paper without one.

fotofreek: You hit it right on the head!! That is what I look for when I use that paper. In fact I actually use Corel Paint to create images using real photographs that basically simulate the results had I set up an easel and actually painted them on site. I print those images on CANSON WC paper and coat with a protectant UV spray either matte to preserve the same subdued look or glossy to enhance the tonal range a bit. If done correctly you just add a tiny bit of "Sheen" I guess one could say without making it look had it been printed on a paper with a "Built in" sheen.

This does NOT work for all images or course. So I am very careful with what ultimately gets printed on this paper.

I will be experimenting with the Hair Spray Pre coating to see when that does and if it is a good enough improvement I will probably do a video on it.

Joe