What the quarry names mean
Indiana limestone is graded two ways. By color it is buff, which is warm, or gray, which is cool, and the two come from different depths in the same beds.
By grain it is select, standard, rugged or variegated, running from the most even to the most fossil-marked. A print calling itself Indiana Buff Select is naming a specific and very well defined material, which is a more precise claim than most printed effects make.
Limestone is the quietest stone
A limestone has almost no veining. What it has is fine even grain, faint tonal drift and occasional fossil traces, and that is the whole of it.
Which makes it the hardest stone to print convincingly and the most useful once printed. There is no figure for the eye to compare between tiles, so a repeated face is far harder to spot than it would be on a marble. The quarried material is limestone tile.
Most of this page is outdoor and trim
Moldings are the largest product type here and a great deal of the range is 20 mm, which is paving thickness rather than tile thickness.
Limestone has been an exterior stone for as long as buildings have been faced in anything, so an outdoor porcelain aiming at it is aiming where the material already lived. The trim pieces exist because a terrace has steps and edges that need a finished front. Porcelain pavers is the outdoor range.
Matte, with almost nothing else
Matte covers nearly this entire range, with small lappato, anti-slip and honed groups behind it.
A limestone will not hold a polish, because its grain is open and soft, and a printed limestone that shone would be claiming something the stone cannot do. The lappato pieces are the interesting exception: a partial polish, ground only at the high points, which is closer to a worn stone floor than either extreme.
Fossils, and what a print can do with them
A real limestone carries fossil traces, since the rock is made from the compacted remains of sea life, and they show as faint pale shapes across the cut face.
Those are the hardest thing for a print to place. Veining runs in lines and can be drawn convincingly; fossil marks are scattered, irregular and different every time, so a printed range with too few faces repeats them visibly. It is the specific thing worth checking on a limestone look that will cover a large floor.
Shade variation on a quiet stone
The pieces here that publish a figure spread across V2, V3 and V4, which is an unusually wide range for one effect.
It reflects the grading of the stone itself. A select limestone is even and a variegated one is heavily marked, and a printed range covering both ends of that scale needs different variation ratings for each. The number on the listing is describing which grade the print is copying.
The colors are a stone list
Sand, dune, limestone, Indiana buff, Indiana gray, charcoal, frost and ash carry the range.
Every one of those names either describes a natural stone tone or names a specific quarry grade. There is no invented color anywhere on the page, which is consistent with what the effect is doing. Compare it with a concrete look range, where names run to abstractions and moods, and the difference tells you that one effect is copying a material and the other is copying an idea.
12x24 and the long formats
12x24 is well in front of everything else in the range, then 12x48, 24x24 and 24x48, with 12x12, 3x24 trim strips, 8x24 and a pattern mix.
The 12x48 matters on this effect. A limestone facade is built of long blocks laid in courses, and a long tile reproduces that proportion where a square does not. It is the format that makes a limestone look read as masonry rather than as flooring.
Where a limestone look goes
A terrace, a courtyard, a hall, a bathroom, a commercial entrance and any wall that wants to read as built rather than finished.
Travertine look tile is the warmer printed neighbor, concrete look tile the plainer one, and porcelain tile the material across every effect.
