Optical Brighteners in Fine Art Prints: Friend or Foe?

The benefits and risks associated with using canvas and papers with optical brighteners.

Optical brighteners (OBAs) are chemicals added to some papers during manufacturing. They absorb UV light and re-emit it as visible light through fluorescence, making the paper appear "whiter than white." This process combines the paper's natural white with the light emitted by the chemical.

There are pros and cons to this method:

Risks of Optical Brighteners in Prints

A key challenge has been the difficulty in creating accurate color profiles for papers containing OBAs. This is because most spectrophotometers, used to read paper color, were misled by OBAs, resulting in inaccurate readings within a portion of the spectrum.

While several attempts were made to rectify this issue, it is only recently that new standards and devices have enabled more successful management of this problem.

Perhaps even more challenging is the impermanence of OBAs, meaning the image's appearance will change over time. What appears vibrant today will eventually dull, and the lasting image will be less bright than when first viewed.

Is longevity always a problem? Not necessarily.

Uses for OBAs

Have you ever wondered how office supply stores can sell reams of bright white paper at such low prices? The secret often lies in Optical Brightening Agents (OBAs). These agents make inexpensive papers look brilliant, and for many applications, their impermanence isn't an issue.

For prints like trade show displays, temporary installations, or evaluation copies (for sizing, retouching, or other tests, rather than final color), OBA-containing papers and canvases are often a cost-effective choice.

However, if your print standards demand archival permanence, OBA-containing papers may not meet those criteria. The impact on archivability can vary, depending on the concentration of OBAs in a particular media.

Consider Breathing Color's Elegance Velvet or Optica One fine art papers as examples. While they contain small amounts of OBAs to achieve an exceptionally bright white, they also meet the Fine Art Trade Guild's 100+ year archival certification standards.

If you're considering OBA-containing media and archival concerns are paramount, it's advisable to investigate whether independent archival testing has been conducted on the specific product.

Going OBA-free

Breathing Color leads the industry in OBA-free papers, with most of their current fine art paper offerings being OBA-free. They indicate which papers are OBA-free and provide a wide selection.

Customers receive Archival Quality Certificates from Breathing Color, validating the longevity of their Chromata White Canvas when used with Glamour II coating and prominent OEM inks. Two different methods and organizations verify this certification. If you combine Chromata White Canvas, Glamour II coating, and aqueous OEM inks from Epson, HP, Canon, or Roland, your giclée print is certified archival.

If you opt for other products, demand similar certification from their manufacturers. The longevity of inkjet prints cannot be accurately determined unless the canvas, laminate, and ink have been tested and certified together. Since most inkjet canvas and fine art papers lack print permanence testing, it's safer to assume they are not archival.

Explore BC’s Pura Velvet and Pura Smooth, certified for over 100 years. Additionally, Lyve Premium Matte Canvas and Crystalline Canvas are OBA-free. As new papers and canvases are introduced on the website, their OBA-free status will be immediately apparent.

You can see in the above photo that OBA-enhanced papers and non-enhanced papers behave very differently under certain illuminations.

The enhanced paper, on the right side, when lit with an ultraviolet light source, is very bright, shouting out its brightness to the world. The non-enhanced substrate is clearly not shouting, quietly sitting there being much the same in ultraviolet and normal light.

I test all my papers with the ultraviolet flashlight you see in the photo to be certain of what I’m using.

Conclusion

The bottom line about Optical Brightening Agents? They make some papers look brighter, and if they meet your requirements, use them.

If fine art or archival prints are needed, OBA-enhanced papers are usually best saved for other uses.