shutterbug guy wrote:
gdanmitchell wrote
shutterbug guy wrote
However, I did “sacrifice” two sheets of paper to create an ICC profile on them and fine-tune the final output with that profile to match or surpass my other big-brand favorites. The detail and color pop, and the lack of bronzing (with the Premium Luster) have been more than satisfactory and actually pleasing to the eye.
Technically, if your profiles are working correctly, the colors and brightness of prints on different papers (at least with the same/similar finish) should look close to identical.
But that can be a tough goal to achieve, especially if you are inspecting very, very closely.
A friend who is a pretty well-regarded printer (and photographer) is a stickler about calibration and papers and different printers. (At one point he had three 60” printers in his studio!) We used to be part of a small review group, and he would bring prints that he had done of various carefully profiled papers and on different printers, which he would ask us to compare carefully.
In the end, a couple of things were generally true. First, we had to look _really_ carefully at side-by-side examples to spot any differences at all, and they were usually so minor that no one would notice in normal viewing. Second, where we could find these tiny differences, we could never agree amongst the group about which were better! Not every difference is a better/worse situation — sometimes different things are just… different.