articles/Paper/epsonhotcold-page3
by Mike McNamee Published 01/02/2010
Hot Pressed Bright White
More of the same with the final paper of the four, another superb colour audit data set. This one was a little towards yellow in the flesh tones, a bias that has the side-effect of returning a zero error in the true yellow - returning a zero error is sufficiently rare to be worthy of comment!
Colour Audit
The average error was 2.33 ΔE₀₀ meaning that all four papers bettered the 2.5 mark 'out of the box'. As we have said, this in itself is noteworthy; we could find no data sets to approach this in our archives.
PAPER PRESSING FOR BEGINNERS
Cold-pressed:
The term cold-pressed refers to the surface of the watercolour paper that you are looking at. Cold-pressed paper is the most common and the most popular among watercolour artists. Cold-pressed watercolour paper has a texture that is right in the middle between smooth and rough. Cold-pressed watercolour paper gets its name from a finishing process employed by the paper makers. After the moulds of paper are created, they are then milled through a set of cylinders to get the cotton fiber to lie down. These cylinders are cold, therefore the name cold-pressed
Hot-pressed:
The term hot-pressed is another term that describes the surface of watercolour paper. Hot-pressed watercolour paper is also milled through a set of cylinders to smooth the cotton fibres down. In the case of hot-pressed watercolour paper, these cylinders are heated. This causes the fibres to lie down in a much smoother arrangement. It is just like ironing your cotton shirt with a hot iron. Hot-pressed watercolour paper is the smoothest texture available and preferred by artists who use lots of detail in their artwork.
Soft-pressed:
The term soft-pressed is yet another term that describes the surface of watercolour paper. However, this term you will see much less often since this surface is only available in watercolour paper in the Fabriano Aritstico line. The texture of softpressed paper is in between cold-pressed and hot-pressed art paper.
Rough:
This is the last of the terms regarding watercolour paper surfaces. Rough watercolour papers are those that are not treated at all. These papers have a rough surface because they are pulled directly from the mould and are not run through cylinders at all. This surface has the highest tooth of any watercolour paper.
OVERALL
A super set of papers with enough differences between them to make them interesting but with a consistently high pedigree in terms of their base materials and a wonderful set of statistics from the profiles available on the web. We did not even attempt to make our own profiles, it would almost certainly have been a futile exercise, the residual errors are only just detectable anyway. Of equal importance to the user is that the media were all extremely flat and we did not have a single issue loading them into the 3800.
For the record we went back and looked out the previous data sets. Hahnemuhle Bamboo held the record at 2.32 ΔE₀₀. Including this latest four, only 10 data sets have bettered 2.5ΔE₀₀. The average for Ultrachrome matt ink results is 3.24, reduced from 3.40 over the past 18 months or so.
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