What inkjet paper are you going to print on? What's best? It’s like asking you to walk into a speciality ice cream shop and ask for an ice cream cone. ‘Certainly, but what kind of ice cream cone would sir like?’

As photographers, we know not to print our images onto normal bond or photocopy paper. This paper isn’t at all suitable for the high quality images we capture and isn’t designed to match the task.

Placing ink onto paper isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. Ink is liquid, so when you pour it onto a flat surface, it tends to spread out or ‘bleed’. Each dot of ink gains in size (hence the term ‘dot gain’ in printing circles). If this bleeding is out of control, the detail and clarity of the image in your prints disappears.

Fortunately, when you use the correct printer driver settings and profiles for your ‘printer, ink and paper’ combination, all the technical stuff is taken care of, so this leaves us to two main choices.

The first choice is do we print with dye-based inks or pigment inks? The second is, on what type of paper do we print?

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