Comparison Report

Comparing Gold Fibre and Duo Lustre was not without its problems. Scanning in the Gold Fibre silk became problematic as we kept getting holes in the profile. It was however due to user error, and the problem was resolved to an acceptable standard.

Visually you can see the Gold silk is lot lower in contrast than the Duo Lustre. It can't cope with vivid colours and loses a lot of micro contrast in black and white areas. This is because the paper is not designed to encompass a wide gamut but more of a style one might wish to use. It possess' a colour to its matte finish which effects the whites and blacks by slightly discoloring them and flattening them out. Though the purpose of this task was to compare the two profiles and papers it seems unfair to pin Gold Fibre against Duo Lustre as they are two very different papers. None the less we can see from the overlayed profiles below and the visual difference in the prints that Duo Lustre technically outperforms Gold Fibre.

However unless you are printing a particular subject such as a landscape or high composite image there is no reason you shouldn't consider Gold Fibre, it would work very nicely with portraits and has a style that would appeal to many. For me it is perhaps a little too coloured. After working in the black and white darkroom I came to really love clean white paper and achieving the richness in the blacks. For this reason when I print digitally I still prefer my whites to be whites and would therefore not use this paper.

Lustre Duo Report

Below is the comparison with the Smooth Lustre Duo and Adobe RGB (1998). Again Adobe has the way more gamut as expected, but how do the two papers compare?

Gold Fibre Silk Report

Below is the comparison between Adobe RGB 1998 and Gold Fibre Silk. Clearly Adobe has the edge in terms of gamut.

Printer Calibration

HDR Submission

Below are my HDR source image and final result. Shooting conditions were early morning so had a long shutter speed with a back lit subject. Use of a polarizer increased the shutter speed but eliminated the reflections in the water and saturated the sky. A subtle HDR however a successful one technically.