We are pleased to announce the release of the second research monograph from the 2011-2012 research agenda to the public. Please read below for more details.

An Analysis of the Factors Influencing Paper Selection for Books of Reproduced Fine Art Printed on Digital Presses (PICRM-2012-02)
by Brian Gamm, Franziska Frey, Ph.D., & Susan Farnand
The research involved three stages: first, interviews with 13 professionals involved in the production of fine art books; second, a psychophysical experiment in which observers ranked images on the basis of image quality; and third, physical measurements of the sample papers. The experimentation used a set of four images—representing four types of art media—which were printed on twelve papers using two digital presses. Results from the psychophysical experiment were analyzed, and a model was developed to predict the probability that a paper was ranked in the top three.
Key findings include:

• The probability of a book being judged as having high image quality was optimized for papers with high coolness, low roughness and low gloss. Neither print-show-through, line raggedness, nor mottle were significant factors.
• An additional lexical analysis provided complementary data to the psychophysical results. Observers’ descriptions of their ranking strategies did not match the rank data, suggesting a possible disconnect between observers’ conscious and subconscious ranking behaviors.

The report is available for download as a PDF from http://print.rit.edu/research/show/169.