Breathing Color Vibrance Baryta

Breathing Color Vibrance Baryta

Some time ago, Breathing Color sent me a package of their recently released Vibrance Baryta paper for testing and write-up. It’s a 100% cotton substrate paper made in the USA at 310 gsm, caliper 16 mils. It comes in “Satin” and “Satin Bright”. I tested the “Satin”. Breathing Color recommends setting the printer’s platen gap to “Widest” for this paper.

We always welcome new entrants to the Baryta paper field, because barium sulfate is an additive that helps produce bright, saturated colour without adding OBAs to the paper formula, and we have experienced a periodic shortage of baryta-based papers, so new product adds options that should help to overcome that inconvenience.

For now, the paper comes in 40-foot rolls at widths of 17, 24, 36, 44, and 60 inches, priced at about $105, 148, 222, 271, and 370, respectively. They also offer a 17-inch x 10-foot trial roll at $37.49. The product is available by ordering it on the Breathing Color website or from a number of retailers in the USA and distributors internationally (listed on the Breathing Color website).

Turning to testing, the first thing I look at is the paper surface, which, as usual, is difficult to convey in an article over the Internet, but Figure 1 shows it as best as I could render it. You would not look at prints angling the prints in the manner I had to angle them to bring out this texture (Figure 1). Normally we want the texture to be quite unobtrusive while it shows the photograph to advantage. This paper does that.

I tested the paper in my Epson SC-P5000 printer as it remains the printer with the widest available colour gamut I’ve ever used, hence suitable for seeing whether the paper can take advantage of the printer’s full capability when properly profiled.

Speaking of profiles, at the time of writing, Breathing Color was advising its customers to make custom profiles for using this paper. An alternative for those with Epson printers is to use the Epson Legacy Baryta 2 profile, which is an option I have also tested. The summary test results are in Figure 2.

The gamut volume produced by my custom profile is smaller than that of using the Epson Legacy Baryta 2 profile with this paper in my SC=P5000 printer – 874K versus 950K, respectively (see also Figure 3). I don’t believe this difference would matter to a great many photographs. Most of the difference is seen in small areas at the green and blue boundaries, as shown in both Figure 2 (rows 10 to 18) and graphically in Figure 3.

According to the readings in ColorThink Pro from the profiles (row 7, columns C and D), the Black point of my custom profile is also a bit higher than that of the Epson Legacy Baryta 2 profile – at L* 4 and L*2 respectively. However, once maximum Black is read off the test prints made from these profiles (row 7 columns E and F), the printed difference of maximum Black is only 0.4 – 4.1 for my custom profile versus 4.5 for the Legacy Baryta 2 profile, hence one would see no difference of maximum Black between them.

The unsurprising result in Figure 2 (rows 20 to 35) is that a custom profile produces more accurate printing than another profile for another paper, good as it may be for that other paper. The average dE of the test patches is 0.5 for the custom profile versus 1.3 for the Epson Legacy profile. The highest dE values are 1.16 and 2.53, respectively. That said, both sets of results are very good, indicating that both would be suitable. Looking at the detailed gray-scale results for both profiles, while the custom is, as expected, more accurate, the other is eminently usable.

Turning from charts and data to prints of real photographs, the findings above are confirmed. Whether using the one profile or the other, the paper supports vibrant, quite accurate colour and detail rendition is fine (Figures 4, 5, 6 and 7).

All in all, a nice paper – give it a try.

Mark D Segal
July 2024

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