Digital Prints

The Dreaded Orange Shift
Acidity
As I discuss more in Chapter 7, acidic components in either a print or the accompanying
support, backing board, or mat can be destructive eventually. Many inkjet papers on the
market are, in fact, produced with an acidic paper base. These papers may have good light
stability but will typically have worse dark stability.
What Can Happen?
■ Paper yellowing over time
■ Slow destruction of print materials
Chapter 5 ■ Determining Print Permanence 151
The problem of atmospheric contamination was rudely brought to everyone’s attention in 2000 by the Orange Shift fiasco. What happened was
that some people’s inkjet prints made on Epson’s Premium Glossy Photo Paper (PGPP) inexplicably experienced severe color shifting, turning
bright orange, sometimes within 24 hours of being printed! But, this didn’t happen to everyone; it was completely dependent on where you lived,
what your local environment was like, and whether your prints were covered or not. It turned out that PGPP was Epson’s first paper to use a
“microporous” coating to improve image quality. Unfortunately, this coating acted like a sponge, soaking up any ozone or other atmospheric contaminants
and speeding up the exchange of gases to the cyan dye in the inks. The cyan rapidly faded, and that left only the yellow and magenta,
which combined to produce orange (“differential fading”). (For those who didn’t have the problem, the prints were—and continue to be—fine.)
Epson, along with everyone else (photographer Bob Meyer points out that this was not just an Epson problem), was caught off-guard, and they
ultimately released new types of paper coatings to help put the problem behind them.
This situation pointed out the importance of air flow over the surface of the print. It is now universally recommended that prints destined for
long-term display should be framed under glass or plastic or otherwise protected from atmospheric contaminants.
Photographer Bob Meyer’s Bair Test
Chart images at bottom show an Epson
Premium Glossy Photo Paper print
before (left) and after exposure to his
“ozone chamber,” which involves
placing the print at the bottom of an
electronic air filter, a known ozone
source. The larger images were taken of
a neutral gray patch on a similarly
orange-shifted print (plus a control)
with a microscope (150x
magnification) by Roger Smith at the
University of New Brunswick, Canada.
Before is on the left; after is on the
right.
Courtesy of Roger Smith (top) and Bob
Meyer (bottom); Bair Test Chart:
www.inkjetart.com/custom/index.html