Ilford Galerie Smooth Pearl 310gsm

Papers are constructed in two main ways:

Resin Coated papers are the modern approach. These use less fibre and replace the fibre with resin (a nice name for plastic). This means these papers are cheap, strong and robust, but tend to be less attractive to the touch and accept less ink. They tend to have a clinical appearance and it's hard to write on the back of them. They tend to be popular in the consumer and wedding/portrait markets.

Fibre Based papers are traditional papers made without plastic, using only plant fibres. These tend to accept more ink and have a more attractive appearance, and these are the papers most of our customers favour.

What is the paper base made from?

Possibilities include:

• Wood Pulp - the most common and cheapest
• Alpha Cellulose - the best part of wood pulp, separated. Generally tested as archival as cotton etc
• Cotton - the most common fine art paper fibre
• Bamboo - an ecologically friendly alternative to cotton
• Mulberry & more - many other plant fibres can be used to make archival paper

These days almost all papers are microporous coated - meaning they'll accept inks from both dye based and pigment printers well.

In years past, some papers had a swellable coating - designed to give a greater life to prints with dye based inks but this approach has fallen out of favour.

In 'gsm' - grams per square metre.

Not, technically, the same as paper thickness, but obviously correlated. The heft of the paper. European art papers are traditionally generally around the 300gsm mark. Asian papers historically tended to be lighter, 100 to 200 gsm.

Papers with a higher GSM tend to have more opacity, i.e. you see less through them.

What is the surface texture of the paper?

We divide this into six groups. We go by the appearance of the actual paper and not what the manufacturer might label the box with!

• Matte - smooth and texture
• Gloss - semi, gloss, and high gloss
• Double Sided - special case papers that are printable to full quality on both sides.

What is the white tone of the paper?

• Cool White - a paper with a distinctly cool (blue) tone
• Bright White - A paper that is brighter than non brightened papers, but not overly cool
• White - a natural clean white tone for an art paper - most Photo Rag papers fall here
• Warm - a distinctly warmer, creamier paper
• Pearlescent - a distinct warm grey tone (generally found only with metallic papers)