PRINTING
Despite all the advances in screen technologies, multimedia publishing, and the explosion of mobile devices, a print is still the best way to view a photograph. A high-caliber print has an almost magical quality, allowing your eyes to linger and absorb the details, colors, and textures in the photo. A good print has presence in a room and commands attention. This chapter is devoted to helping you make prints that become the focal point in a room, that elicit oohs and aahs from admirers, and that showcase your very best work.
Fr uit stand, Sant Cugat, Spain. Olympus E-3, 12–60mm lens, 1/25 second at f2.8, ISO 400
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The tools for creating great prints— incredible cameras, robust technology, and precision printers—are better than ever.
Unfortunately, the printing process still isn’t easy. Push-button printing yields good, but not great, results. The very best prints
pixel values in your photograph. Calibrating and profiling your monitor ensures that the display of your photos isn’t altered by any color biases or inaccuracies in your monitor.
I can’t emphasize the importance of calibration strongly enough.
come from photographers who have a deep
On the Web
Without a calibrated monitor,
understanding of the printing process. From calibrating the monitor, to selecting a paper and optimizing your photos for the printing process, the more invested you become in the printing process, the better and more consistent your prints will be.
In this chapter, I’ll introduce you to the printing options available to you. Then I’ll help you get the best results regardless of the printing method you use. Don’t be daunted; by following a few simple steps, consistent, brilliant prints are within reach.
Before you begin any part of the printing process, it is essential that you calibrate
and profile your monitor to ensure that what you’re seeing on screen is an accurate representation of the colors and tones in the original file.
Monitor Calibration and Profiling
One of the most critical components in a digital photography workflow is an effectively calibrated and profiled monitor. At every point in your workflow, you’re making judgment decisions on tone, contrast, color, and saturation. These judgments are all based on the assumption that what you see on the monitor is an accurate representation of the
your corrections are little more than educated guesses, and when you begin the printing process and your prints don’t match your monitor, these guesses usually come back to haunt you. For this reason, I consider this section to be among the most important in the entire book. I’ve tried to pack as much information about monitor calibration as possible here, but this is a complex topic with details that change frequently. I continue the monitor calibration discussion and provide my recommendations online at www
.perfectdigitalphotography.com/monitors.php.
What Is Monitor Calibration?
Before diving into the nitty-gritty of monitor calibration, let’s take a step back and look
at what monitor calibration is and why it is important. Here I’ll define the two commonly used terms, calibration and profiling.
Try and remember the last time you walked into an electronics store and looked at the wall of televisions. Many of the TVs were tuned to the same station, but all of them displayed a slightly different picture, even those by the same manufacturer. If you were to perform the same test with computer monitors, you’d see the same phenomenon. Every monitor displays color
in a slightly different way. This is a part of the color characteristics of the monitor that are caused in part by the materials used to build the monitor, the video card used on your
computer, and the specific settings selected on the monitor itself. These differences are less acute with more expensive monitors, but they are still present.
If you can’t trust the color on the screen, it is impossible to perform accurate image corrections, because you can never be sure whether the blue color cast you see in the image is actually present in the photograph or is imparted by the monitor. To work efficiently, you need to be able to trust that what you see on screen is accurate and make decisions confidently. This is why monitor calibration is a necessity.
When most people say monitor calibration, they are actually referring to two separate processes: monitor calibration and profiling. Monitor calibration is the process of changing the behavior of the monitor
to match a known state. With old CRT monitors, you could physically change the amount of red, green, and blue used by the hardware within the monitor. With newer LCD monitors, this degree of control isn’t possible because of the way LCD monitors are constructed. With LCD monitors, the only control we can calibrate is the monitor brightness, bringing it to a known brightness value. During the monitor calibration process, after the brightness is set, you’ll begin the profiling process. Profiling means measuring the color characteristics of a device in its
current state, and then building a lookup table to compensate for the differences.
To reiterate, calibration changes the physical controls of the monitor to match a known state. Profiling measures the color
characteristics of the monitor in that state and builds a color profile to compensate for any differences. This two-part process minimizes the differences among monitors, printers, scanners, and other devices integrated into your digital photography workflow. It also ensures that when you and I look at the same photo, we see the same photo, regardless of our monitor type, brand, size, or age. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll be referring to both calibration and profiling when I use the term monitor calibration.
Now that you understand the critical role monitor calibration plays in your workflow, let’s look at the devices you’ll use to calibrate your monitor before getting into specific recommendations for calibrating your monitor for best results.
Monitor Calibration Tools
All good monitor calibration packages combine a physical device you place over the front of the monitor and a software application to assist in the calibration and profiling of the monitor. Avoid software-only packages that rely on your eyes to guide the corrections.
Human color vision is too subjective a way to perform a monitor calibration—it’s like trying to measure the thickness of a piece of paper with a yardstick. It can be done, but the results are far from accurate.
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Two types of hardware devices are used to calibrate your monitor: colorimeters and spectrophotometers. Colorimeters can be used only for measuring light emitted by another source, such as a monitor. This makes them ideal for calibrating monitors or digital projectors, but useless for creating print profiles. Spectrophotometers can measure either emissive or reflective light, which allows them to build profiles for monitors, projectors, and printers. Colorimeters are generally more accurate than similarly priced spectrophotometers, but this discrepancy is becoming less the case.
So Which Do You Need?
If you plan to have others perform most of your printing, you’ll need only a colorimeter for calibrating your monitor. If you plan do to
a significant amount of printing on your own inkjet printer, you may be better served with a less- expensive spectrophotometer. If you’re a real stickler for quality and will perform all your own printing, often on specialized paper types,
you’ll want both a colorimeter and a spectrophotometer.
Monitor Calibration with i1Display 2
The i1Display 2 from X-Rite is one of several excellent monitor calibration packages for photographers to choose from. In this section,
I’ll walk you through the steps needed to calibrate and profile your monitor. Although the exact steps will differ
if you’re using another monitor calibration package, the fundamentals are the same.
Begin by plugging the measurement device into one of the USB ports on your computer. Avoid using the USB ports on your keyboard because these lack sufficient power to allow the colorimeter or spectrophotometer to communicate with the monitor calibration software.
Step 1 In the initial screen, select the type of device you want to profile and choose the Advanced calibration option. Don’t worry— you’ll see there’s nothing too advanced about it. Click the right arrow to continue.
Step 2 Next, you’re prompted to select your monitor type. This helps the software tailor the options available to you in the software and ensures that the measurements taken by the colorimeter are interpreted accurately. Make your selection and click the right arrow.
Step 3 Next, you need to specify your White Point, Gamma, and Luminance settings. Almost all monitor calibration utilities allow you to set white point and gamma, but only a few allow you to set luminance. This is a shame, because setting luminance is the key to matching the lightness of your screen with your prints. Since these terms are most likely new to you, here are quick definitions.
■ White Point Your monitor’s white point setting determines the color
of the brightest white on screen. Much in the same way you adjust white balance on your camera or in Lightroom to match the color of the ambient light in the scene, you can adjust the white point of your monitor to match a print viewing condition.
For best results, I recommend selecting a White Point of 6500 Kelvin. Some advanced users may need to vary from this
recommendation, but 6500 Kelvin is a perfect starting point for most users.
■ Gamma The Gamma setting controls the amount of contrast through the midtones. A gamma of
2.2 is recommended for both Mac
and Windows users because it better matches the contrast of most inkjet printers and reduces cross-platform differences when previewing and displaying photos online.
■ Luminance Providing a recommendation for a Luminance setting is tricky, because the ideal setting is the one that matches your typical print viewing condition. Since I can’t sit with you in your studio, you may have to do a little experimentation. I recommend starting with a luminance of 110 cm2 (candelas per meter squared), but you may need to adjust this value up or down depending on the lighting in your studio. See the
“Lighting” section a little later in the chapter for more information.
Many of the newer and less expensive monitors on the market cannot be set dimmer than 150 or 200 cm2.
In this case, set your monitor at the lowest setting.
Step 4 When prompted, place your measurement device over the center of your monitor. Avoid placing the device in the corners of the monitor as you will likely get an inaccurate reading, because monitors vary most significantly at the edges. You may want to tilt the monitor back slightly to help the device sit flush against the face of the monitor. I also recommend dimming or turning off additional lights in your studio to eliminate ambient light that may affect
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the readings taken by the device. Click the right arrow to continue.
Caution If you’re using an LCD or LED monitor, do not affix the suction cups to the front
of the monitor because this can ruin your monitor! Simply rest the device
against the monitor face.
Step 5 If prompted to set Contrast, click Start in the lower corner of the
dialog, and then use the feedback from the measurement device to decrease your Contrast to the correct range. Your aim is
to make the vertical bar come to rest in the center of the green range in the Contrast Indicator. For many monitors, you will not need to perform any adjustment.
Step 6 In the next screen, you are prompted to select which kind of white point control your monitor contains. For LCD monitors, there is no real control over the monitor’s white point. Some monitors offer a software control over the
monitor white point, but this is usually less effective for correcting the monitor’s color than letting your monitor’s ICC profile compensate for any color casts. Click the right arrow to skip this step.
Step 7 Next, you’re asked to set the monitor brightness. Click Start to enter the Brightness module. Use the controls on your monitor to match your monitor brightness to the recommended range indicated by the green bars.
Tip After making an adjustment, allow the software time to take a couple measurements, as a change in the brightness setting often takes 15 to 30 seconds to settle into your new adjustment.
After configuring your settings, click on the right arrow to continue with the profiling portion of the monitor calibration.
Step 8 The Eye-One Match software displays a series of colored patches on the screen. The measurement device measures the displayed color values, and then the software compares the measured colors against the expected colors, creating a lookup table that compensates for the unique characteristics of your monitor.
Once this process is completed, you’ll see a summary screen. The most important aspect of the summary screen is the Curve. Ideally, the red, green, and blue curves should appear as diagonal lines. Any deviation from a straight line indicates an area where the software had to compensate
for a deficiency in the monitor. The greater the compensation, the more likely you will encounter problems in the accuracy and gray balance of your monitor. This screen is taken from an HP w1907, a $200 secondary monitor I use for displaying my palettes.
I’m pleased with this result, but I would be concerned if the curves showed more variation than this.
Step 9 Click the Finish Calibration button to save and activate your monitor profile in your operating system. You will be reminded to recalibrate your monitor in four weeks, a good guideline for most photographers. If you’re doing a lot of printing, or you’re about to embark on a large printing session, you may want to calibrate more frequently.
See, that wasn’t so hard! As monitor calibration tools have evolved, they have become more accurate and easier to use. If you’re serious about your photography, you really have no excuse not to calibrate your monitor regularly.
Lighting
It might strike you as odd that in the introduction to a digital printing chapter, I’d insert a section on room lighting. The truth is, lighting is one of the biggest bugaboos for photographers who create their own prints.
Lighting and room color can influence the appearance of colors in a photograph significantly enough to make the print no longer match the photo on screen.
While most photographers won’t want to paint their studio or workspace neutral gray, block up the windows, replace their room lighting, and wear nothing but black, you do need to be aware of the influence your viewing environment has on a finished print. Here you’ll learn some of the steps you can take to mitigate potential problems.
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Discounting the Illuminant
You’ve undoubtedly encountered this problem: your eye sees color one way, and your camera records it another. The most common example occurs when you take pictures indoors with daylight film or a daylight white balance. Even though your eyes saw the colors as neutral,
the camera recorded the orange light imparted by the incandescent light illuminating the room. Our eyes don’t regularly perceive the orange light in the room because our visual system has a unique ability to filter out colors imparted by different light sources, so we see colors the same, whether they are illuminated by an incandescent light, fluorescent light, or daylight. This phenomenon, called discounting the illuminant, is why we have to change
the white balance setting on our digital cameras or adjust the White Balance settings in Lightroom to make colors in our photos match what we saw in the original scene.
This system works well in our everyday environment. We see skin tones correctly regardless of the light source, and we see white paper as white even though the light reflected off the page might be orange, green, or blue. However, our ability to selectively filter out colors imparted by a light source becomes problematic when we’re critically judging the color of prints. Our eyes want to see the paper as white, and usually do, but we cannot always account for the shift in colors. Hence, when viewing a print under an incandescent light, skin tones may appear warm or ruddy and neutrals may appear orange. Under fluorescent lights, neutral colors may appear pink or green
depending on the printer used. The mismatch between colors viewed under two different light sources is called metamerism. These differences become particularly pronounced when you compare a print viewed under one light source with your monitor, which is itself a light source, and is typically set to a daylight white balance. The color differences between the two light sources causes your print not to match the color on your monitor.
Improving the Screen-to-Print Match
The simplest solution for improving the screen- to-print match is to install daylight-balanced lightbulbs in your workspace. This inexpensive solution is often satisfactory for most amateur to semipro photographers. When shopping
for light bulbs, look for a color temperature of 5000–6500 Kelvin (K) (5000 K is ideal) and a color-rendering index (CRI) of 92
or better. You can find these specifications listed on many bulb manufacturers’ websites. To simplify your search, here are a few suggestions.
Incandescent Lights If you use incandes- cent fixtures in your workspace, you’re best served by switching to daylight-balanced compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Not only will the compact fluorescent bulbs use less energy and last longer, but they are a better match than any of the daylight-balanced incandescent bulbs I’ve tested.
The downside of fluorescent lights is they don’t illuminate all colors evenly. This can cause problems with print viewing, but
fluorescents are a good, all-purpose solution for most photographers.
Halogen Lights If you use halogen lighting in your workspace, look for the 5000K bulbs from SoLux (www.solux.net). These are the bulbs of choice for many discriminating
fine-art photographers and are superior to fluorescent bulbs because they illuminate colors across the spectrum more evenly.
Fluorescent Lights There are several commonly available daylight-balanced fluorescent bulbs to fit most any fixture. Look for the GE Chroma 50 or the Sylvania Designer 5000K.
Daylight The most effective and inexpensive light source for viewing photos is north-facing daylight. Whenever I’m judging prints or comparing color accuracy between prints, I always try to find indirect daylight. Of course, the disadvantage with daylight is it isn’t
always available, nor is it always consistent. Nevertheless, I prefer to use daylight as my guide unless I have access to a commercial viewing booth.
Viewing Booths The best solution for print viewing, particularly when comparing prints to your monitor, is a print-viewing booth. These booths use the highest quality,
daylight-balanced fluorescent bulbs, and many allow you to dim the light source to create an accurate match to your monitor brightness.
Using a viewing booth in a dimly lit room minimizes any additional color contamination
caused by paint color, clothing, furniture, or other objects in the room.
Room Brightness The intensity of the light in your workspace matters just as much as the color of the light used to illuminate the
room. Dimly lit rooms cause colors to muddy, shadow detail to disappear, and sharpness to fade. Prints in a brightly lit room look sharp, saturated, and brilliant. The ideal setup is
a dimmable viewing booth in an otherwise dimly lit room. Since most of us don’t have that luxury, you can install blinds to control the amount of daylight striking your monitor and your prints since the light levels can vary significantly throughout the day.
I recommend establishing the best lighting setup you can for performing your color-critical tasks, and then tailor your workflow around these conditions. For example, if you prefer to use indirect window light for print viewing, set your monitor’s luminance level to match the lightness of prints displayed in the window light. Refrain from making color decisions unless you can view the results in ideal lighting conditions.
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When you have calibrated your monitor and your lighting is under control, you can truly begin printing with confidence. Without addressing these elements, troubleshooting any print problems becomes difficult, time consuming, and can often lead to inferior results.
The Art o f Printing
Before committing ink to paper to create a print, it is well worth your time to think
through the printing process and ask yourself why you’re printing this photo and what you hope to achieve with the print. This process offers valuable insight into the type of printing process you should use, the paper type that will best suit your print, and any additional corrections that may be necessary to refine your photo for the best print.
To simplify the discussion, I’ll use three classifications of prints and discuss the
preparation and printing procedures for each:
■ Snapshot and keepsake prints
■ Portfolio prints
■ Fine-art prints
Note these are hypothetical categories used to describe a particular type of print or device. In reality, there is significant overlap between the categories.
Snapshot and Keepsake Prints
As the name implies, snapshot and keepsake prints recall a place, event, or person rather than play a central role in preserving your photographic legacy. Snapshot prints require
a lower degree of color accuracy and print quality than a fine-art print because snapshot prints are designed to be stored in albums or small picture frames on a desk, rather than hung on a wall and viewed as art.
When printing snapshots, you will often favor speed over quality. Most snapshot prints are 8 × 10 inches or smaller, making them ideally suited for printing at a digital minilab due to the low cost per print and quick turnaround time that digital minilabs provide.
Most digital minilabs use a Fuji Frontier printer, or a similar printer, which uses RGB lasers to expose your image on to photosensitive paper. These printers are commonplace in photo retailers, the photo departments of big-box stores, and online print retailers. These printers make good
quality prints very quickly and inexpensively, making them ideal for printing snapshots and keepsake prints.
To prepare your photos for printing on a digital minilab printer, you’ll want to set your photos to the correct size and proportion for printing (4 × 6, 5 × 7, and so on), convert your photo to the sRGB color space, and save your photos in either the TIFF or JPEG format at an image resolution of 300 ppi.
TIFF is the preferred format when delivering image files in-person to a photo lab, and JPEG is preferred if you are uploading photos via the Internet to an online photo lab. When saving JPEG files for printing,
use a high Quality setting (10 or higher in Photoshop; 80 or higher in Lightroom). This
makes the upload process smoother for you while maintaining image quality for printing.
While digital minilabs are great for quick printing, they often lack the quality and consistency needed for portfolio-grade or
fine-art printing. Because these machines print high volumes of photos every hour, the print quality drifts throughout the course of the day, which can mean that a print made in the morning can appear different from the same file printed in the afternoon. Additionally, digital minilab printers often have a difficult time maintaining detail in the deep shadows or bright highlights.
Despite those limitations, digital minilabs produce good quality prints less expensively than you can print on your own inkjet printer. For quick proof prints of a wedding or portrait session, a keepsake of a family gathering, or a volume of prints for an album, digital minilabs can’t be beat.
Tip Some photographers are able to improve the quality of prints they receive from digital minilabs by using an ICC profile created for their favorite digital minilab. The Dry Creek Photo website (www.drycreekphoto.com/icc/ index.html) stores custom ICC profiles for many popular labs around the world. Check to see if a profile exists for a lab near you.
Portfolio Prints
When you’re sharing your work with others in a photographic portfolio, you want to present the best reproduction of your work. However, you are often limited in print size and
constrained by the cost of producing a large number of prints. (For the purposes of this discussion, a portfolio print is any print larger than letter size up to 13 × 19 inches in size.)
These prints are really the bread-and- butter prints of serious photographers and are most commonly produced on a desktop inkjet printer capable of making prints up to 13 × 19 inches in size. This category of photo printers is compact, affordable ($400 to $700), and produces stunning prints. In fact, the only real differences between a printer of this size and a wide-format printer costing several times more is print size and the size of the ink cartridges, which is more economical for printing a large number of photos. In short, these 13 × 19 inch printers are remarkable and, dare I say, revolutionary machines.
One of the many advantages of using an inkjet printer over a digital minilab is the range of papers from which you can choose. With minilab printers, you can choose between glossy or matte paper. The glossy
papers tend to show fingerprints and they scuff easily, while the matte option is really more of a semi-gloss finish. With your inkjet printer,
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you have literally hundreds of different papers and finishes, colors, and weights from which to choose—from high-gloss to cotton rag art paper. Each paper imparts a unique quality to the print, making paper selection an art unto itself.
Photographers new to the printing process are best served using a paper produced by the same manufacturer as your printer (that is, Epson paper on an Epson printer).
This simplifies the print-making process, as the paper’s finishes are designed to be used with the manufacturer’s printers and the ICC profiles are installed on your computer when
you install the printer software. This eliminates many of the potential pitfalls that can occur when making your own prints.
I’ll discuss the specific steps required to print from both Photoshop and Lightroom in the respective sections that follow.
Fine-Art Prints
Viewing a great fine-art print is an awe- inspiring experience. A large print displayed in a gallery or home is like a window into another world. Digital printing processes have made it easier and more affordable for photographers to make very large prints. It is not uncommon for photographers to make 20 × 30 or 30 × 40 inch prints from their digital photos.
Fine-art prints are most commonly produced on a large-format inkjet printer or wide-format photographic printer such as the Océ LightJet. A large-format inkjet printer is similar in function and construction to a 13 ×
19 inch printer, but with a longer carriage and larger ink cartridges, and it’s designed to print from long rolls of paper instead of cut sheets. These printers are significantly more expensive to purchase, but the per-print costs are less owing to the bulk inks and roll papers.
The Océ LightJet and similar printers use a photographic printing process that’s similar to that of digital minilabs, but the LightJet produces a higher quality print and can make prints up to 48 inches wide. This class of printers is found in professional digital photo labs. The quality control among these printers is much higher than that of digital minilabs, and most professional photo labs can provide you with a custom ICC profile for use with the printer in use. These professional labs
are a great way for photographers to make large prints without investing thousands of dollars in purchasing and maintaining a large- format inkjet printer. Plus, you will often
get the benefit of working with a trained lab technician who can recommend the optimal steps for preparing photos for the lab’s printer. Many will give you a smaller proof print and allow you to make minor corrections before
the final print is created. This is a valuable service and can make the printing process significantly easier for photographers.
When preparing photos for printing on a large-format printer at a professional photo lab, I recommend first asking the lab for its print specifications. Ask which ICC profile you should use, file type the lab prefers, and
recommended image resolution. If the lab does not have this information, you are safe giving the lab the highest resolution photo you have in the Adobe RGB 1998 color space at 300 ppi, saved in the TIFF format. Often, the lab will have to make adjustments in its workflow to tailor your file for optimal reproduction on its printers, but a professional lab should have no problem working with a file delivered with these specifications.
Preparing photos for a large-format inkjet printer is much the same as printing to a 13-inch inkjet printer, with one notable
exception: image size. When producing jumbo prints, the image size needed frequently exceeds the native image size from your camera. You will need to upsample your photo for the larger print size. For recommendations on maintaining the image quality while upsampling, be sure to read the “Go Big!
Image Upsampling in Photoshop” section later in this chapter. Otherwise, follow the directions included in the “Printing from Lightroom” and “Printing from Photoshop” sections that follow.
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Printing to an
Inkjet Printer
Most photographers own some type of inkjet printer and use it for creating prints at home or in the studio. Some of my best photographic memories are of seeing a favorite photo roll out of the printer, ready for framing. Conversely, some of my greatest frustrations with digital photography have
occurred when trying to troubleshoot an inkjet printer producing off-color or incorrectly sized prints. At these times, the inkjet seemed like an impetuous child, determined to stonewall my printing efforts and bring me to tears
in the process. In this section, I’ll walk you through the steps necessary to print from both Lightroom and Photoshop, helping you avoid potential pitfalls in the process. At the end of this section, the troubleshooting portion will provide assistance when things go awry.
The Printing Process
Printing from a program such as Lightroom and Photoshop is a two-part process. In
the first part, you select from a series of application-specific print options. This prepares the photo for delivery to the printer driver, the software used to convert your pixels into ink dots. Most problems occur at the interface between the application’s print options and the print driver. At the default settings, most applications and print drivers conflict in the color management settings, causing poor-quality prints and immense frustration for photographers. The newest
versions of Lightroom and Photoshop help eliminate some of these frustrations, but problems can, and will, occur unless you learn how to control the color management settings within your application’s print dialogs and in the print driver.
Printing from Lightroom
Of all the photo-editing programs currently on the market, Lightroom makes printing the easiest. Once you dial in your print settings with Lightroom, printing becomes a joy, not a hassle, with consistent prints only a few clicks away.
All printing in Lightroom is handled through the Print module. Within the Print module, panels on the right side of the screen control your print options and panels on the left side of the screen allow you to create, store, and access frequently used print templates, or presets. Use the Collections panel to quickly access photos grouped in a collection.
Step 1 In the upper-left corner of the print layout window, your current Print Settings and Page Setup are displayed along with the number of pages needed to print the photos currently selected in the Filmstrip. If this display does not reflect your current setup, click the Page Setup option to specify the printer and the paper size you will use for printing.
Step 2 For now, leave the Settings at their default settings. During the printing process, you’ll create a printing preset you can use for future prints.
Step 3 At the upper-right corner of the Print module is the Layout Engine panel. Here, you’ll specify whether you want to make a Contact Sheet/Grid or Picture Package. The Contact Sheet/Grid option is used for printing a single photo or several different photos. The Picture Package option is used when you’re printing several copies of the same photo. For standard printing, select Contact Sheet/Grid.
Step 4 The Image Settings panel offers several options that affect the layout of photos on a printed page. The two most important are the Zoom to Fill and Rotate to Fit options. Lightroom adds photos to the printed page by creating “cells,” or spaces
on the page, where a photo can be added for printing. You can have a single cell on a page for printing a single photo or many cells on the page for printing a contact sheet. In the Image Settings panel, you can control how the photos are added to the cells.
The Zoom to Fill option allows the photo to fit the dimensions of the cell, even if the proportions of the photo don’t match the proportions of the cell. This saves you from having to manually crop the dimensions
of your photo to match the dimension of the print. I recommend leaving this option checked.
The Rotate to Fit option automatically rotates photos to fit within the dimensions of the cell. Leave this checked as well.
Step 5 In the Layout panel, specify the page margins, number of cells on the page, spacing between cells, and the cell size.
Your inkjet printer often requires that a minimum margin exists between the edge of the photo and the edge of the paper to help feed the paper through the machine. Set these dimensions in the Margins area. Many printers use a 0.25-inch margin on the top, right, and left sides of the paper with a
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When Zoom to Fill is not checked, the photo
doesn’t extend to the top and bottom of the cell
because the image propor tions differ from the pr int propor tions.
When Zoom to Fill is checked, the photo fills the cell, giving you a full-sized pr int by slightly cropping the
photo. You can reposition the crop by clicking inside the cell and moving the photo within the cell.
0.56-inch margin on the bottom. If you are printing borderless prints, set all Margins sliders to 0.
Step 6 Specify the number of cells per page using the Page Grid sliders. For a single photo, set both the Rows and Columns sliders to 1. Increase the number of cells to print multiple photos per page or to create
a contact sheet. Obviously, as the number
of print cells increases, the size available for each one decreases. If you have selected several photos, and not enough cells are available to print all the selected photos,
Lightroom will automatically generate additional pages to print all selected photos. When multiple cells are added to a page, the Cell Spacing option is activated, allowing you to control the space between each cell. If only a single cell is selected, this option is grayed out.
Step 7 Using the Cell Size sliders, set the cell size. Any selected cell size will be applied to all cells. When using the Contact Sheet option, all cells on the page will be the same size. If you need to produce several different print sizes per page, go back and select
the Picture Package option in the Layout Engine panel.
Step 8 When making portfolio and fine- art prints, you can safely skip the Guides and Overlays panels. The Guides panel allows you to show or hide page layout guides within Lightroom. The Overlay panel allows you to add identity watermarks, crop marks, or metadata displays to your photos.
The Print Job panel is used to specify your print resolution and output sharpening, and to select your printer’s ICC profile. These are the most important printing options in Lightroom and it is essential that you check the Print Job panel before each and every print.
Step 9 In the Print Job panel’s Print To section, be sure Printer is selected and Draft Mode Printing is unchecked. The Draft Mode Printing option is used for making quick contact sheets. Lightroom will use the preview image instead of the high-resolution
original for printing. This saves time but sacrifices quality in larger prints.
Step 10 In the Print Resolution field, enter your print resolution. Although philosophies differ on the optimal print resolution for fine-art printing,
I recommend using a print resolution between 240 and 360 ppi. See the sidebar “Print Resolution Tests” later in this chapter for more information.
Step 11 Use the Print Sharpening field to tailor your output sharpening for the paper type and your personal preference. Select Glossy or Matte to match your paper type, and select the intensity of sharpening you’d like applied to the photo—low, standard, or high.
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manufacturer supports 16 bpc printing in its print driver. Support for this feature is limited at this time, but I expect it will gain wider acceptance in coming years. See the sidebar “Print Resolution Tests” later in this chapter for additional information.
Step 13 The Color Management panel includes the final options within Lightroom that must be addressed before you print.
Here, you’ll select the ICC profile for the printer and paper combination you’re using for printing. Unlike many applications, which list all the ICC profiles installed in your operating system, Lightroom allows you to show only the profiles you use on
a regular basis. If this is your first time printing from Lightroom, this list will be blank. From the Profile pull-down menu, click Other, and then in the resulting Choose Profiles dialog box, check the box next to each of the papers you use on a regular basis. This populates the pull-down menu with your commonly-used ICC profiles, facilitating the printing process. When you are finished, click OK to exit the dialog.
Step 14 Now that your list is updated, select the ICC profile that corresponds to the printer and paper combination currently in use, and then choose a Rendering Intent. For most images, I recommend the Relative rendering intent, as this will give you the best color accuracy between your screen and the final print.
Step 15 At this point, you can click Print to enter your manufacturer’s print dialogs. Yes, unfortunately there are more options to choose from. To make your life easier,
I recommend saving this setup as a print template. This allows you to bypass all the above options with a single click, saving much time in the printing process. If you
would prefer not to create a print template, skip the next section and continue with “Navigating the Print Driver.”
Creating a Print Template
Lightroom’s print templates store all your settings associated with a particular print setup. This includes the paper size, number of images printed on a page, print resolution,
sharpening, ICC profile, and so forth. You will want to create a print template for each of the papers and print sizes you commonly use.
Step 1 After configuring all the print options discussed in the preceding section, click the plus (+) symbol in the upper-right corner of the Template Browser panel on the left side of the Print module screen.
Step 2 Give your template a descriptive name. I recommend including the printer, paper type, and print size—plus 1-up or
2-up, and so on—to indicate the number of prints on the page. This will help you quickly select the correct template from the list.
Step 3 Click Create to save your template in the User Templates folder. This template will now be available from within the Template Browser panel in the Print module.
Navigating the Print Driver
After you’ve configured all of Lightroom’s print settings, just a bit more work needs to be done before your masterpiece can be created. When you leave Lightroom and launch the print driver, you must set your paper type, set your print resolution, and turn off color management. The exact steps
necessary to accomplish all three actions differ between print manufacturers and printer model, making it impossible for me to provide exact directions. The screen shots shown in the following sections are from the Epson 2880 printer and are common to the newest generation of Epson printers. Read your owner’s manual or visit one of the
many online forums for the exact steps necessary to print on your printer. The websites www.RobGalbraith.com and www
.luminouslandscape.com offer printer reviews and discussions on printing to various printers.
Set Paper Type The Paper Type, or Media Type, setting helps your printer control the amount of ink applied to the paper. Each paper finish requires a slightly different mix. Too much ink and the ink cannot be absorbed correctly into the paper, causing streaking.
Too little ink limits the color gamut, resulting in weak and desaturated colors. Choose the
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Media Type that best matches the paper currently installed in the printer. Selecting the wrong Media Type is one common reason for poor print quality.
When using manufacturer-branded paper, you should see your paper type listed exactly. For third-party papers, read the insert included in the paper’s box for the correct media setting to use with your printer.
Tip If your paper type isn’t listed, your printer may use two different types of black ink: one for glossy or luster surfaces and a second for matte papers. If you are using a matte paper and see only glossy papers listed in the Media Type settings, you may need to swap your black inks. Refer to your owner’s manual or online documentation for instructions.
Set Print Resolution The print resolution is the number of ink dots your printer applies per inch of paper. It does not directly correlate to your image resolution, but it does play
an important role in the quality of the final print. Generally speaking, the higher the print resolution, the sharper your print. The downside of selecting a high print resolution is that your print takes longer to create. For keepsake or portfolio prints, I recommend
printing at 1440 dpi. For fine-art prints, I recommend setting your print resolution at the maximum setting. In recent print tests, this improved image quality more than a higher image resolution or printing from 16 bpc photos. See the sidebar “Print Resolution Tests” for more information.
Turn Off Color Management After specifying the ICC profile within Lightroom, it is essential that you turn off color management in your print driver. Otherwise, your photo will be color managed twice. The results usually aren’t pretty. This is the single most common cause of poor printing from inkjet printers. With every print, manually check to make sure color management is turned off in your print driver.
Once you’ve addressed all three steps, click
Print to create your masterpiece.
Tip My printer doesn’t let me turn off color management. All modern 13 × 19 inch and larger printers allow you to disable color management in the print driver. This is not true for the smaller, consumer-grade printers. If you’re printing to one of these devices, you will not be able to fully color manage your prints. For best results, follow these steps:
Step 1. In the Color Management area of the Print Job panel, click the Profile pop-up menu and click Managed By Printer.
Step 2. In your print driver, set your Paper Type and Print Resolution as recommended earlier, and then use the default option for color management. This will give you good quality prints. You may want to experiment with other color settings, sometimes referred to as quality settings, to see if other options produce better prints.
Printing from Photoshop
After creating your master file in Photoshop, complete with adjustment layers, masks, and selective corrections, you have two options for printing this photo. You can save the photo as a layered PSD and print from within Lightroom, or you can print directly from
Photoshop. Generally, I find it simpler to print from Lightroom because I can utilize presets to ensure all my prints are created with the same settings.
When you’re preparing to print from Photoshop, I recommend that you save your layered master file in the PSD format, and then create a duplicate copy of your photo for printing (Image > Duplicate). This allows
you to make print-specific corrections, like sharpening, without affecting your master file.
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Preparing Images for Printing in Photoshop
Unlike Lightroom, where many preparatory steps for printing are handled automatically, Photoshop requires that you set the image dimensions and image resolution and perform your output sharpening before clicking the Print button. Since each of these steps has been covered in detail elsewhere in this book, I’ll give you a quick refresher, along with a few tips, before moving into the printing options in Photoshop.
Image Size and Resolution Set your photo’s print size and image resolution using the Image Size dialog box (Image > Image Size). You’ll want your image resolution between 240 and 360 ppi, depending on the size of your print and the size of your original file.
If the dimensions of your photo don’t exactly match your print dimensions, you will need to crop the photo to fit the print dimensions. The quickest way to do this is to select the Crop tool (C) and then enter the
width and height of your print, along with the desired image resolution in the Options bar.
Drag your crop square over the image.
Photoshop will automatically restrict the crop square to the print proportions. Press enter or return to accept the crop, and your photo will automatically be resized to the correct print size and image resolution.
Output Sharpening Create a new layer for storing your output sharpening. This allows you to apply the sharpening selectively to the most important areas within the image and helps protect against oversharpening. When printing to matte or watercolor paper, you will often need to make the photo appear oversharp on screen to compensate for the loss of sharpness that occurs as the ink bleeds through the absorbent paper.
Be sure to perform your sharpening after you’ve resized your image to the final print size, as this will ensure the best image quality in the finished print.
Printing to an Inkjet Printer from Photoshop
After you’ve completed all the preparatory steps, printing photos from Photoshop is fairly straightforward and similar to printing in Lightroom.
Step 1 Click the Print command from the File menu (File > Print) to begin the printing process.
Step 2 In the left third of the Print dialog is the print preview, which you can use to check the layout and positioning of your photo on the
paper. Immediately below the print preview are three checkboxes: Match Print Colors, Gamut Warning, and Show Paper White.
■ Match Print Colors Performs a soft proof of your photo using the currently selected ICC profile.
■
Gamut Warning Adds a gray overlay to the preview of any colors that are outside the printer’s color gamut.
■
Show Paper White Adjusts the preview to reflect the actual paper color instead of a standard white background.
Step 3 The center column of the Print dialog contains options related to printer selection, layout, paper size, and image size. Beginning at the top of the dialog, verify that your printer is selected from the Printer pull-down menu.
Step 4 Specify the number of copies you want to print, and, if necessary, change the orientation
of your print from portrait to landscape using the
orientation buttons. Should you need to select a new paper size, click the Page Setup
button.
Step 5 The Position and Scaled Print
Size sections allow you to tailor the layout and print size options quickly prior to printing. In the Position section, leave Center Image
checked to have your photo placed in the center of the page, or uncheck this
option to position the print manually on the page.
The Scaled Print Size section displays the scale, height, width, and print resolution. If your print size is larger than the paper size, you can quickly scale the photo to the maximum print size by checking Scale to
Fit Media. For best results, you will want to specify your print size and image resolution before using the Print dialog and leave these options at their default settings.
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The right side of the Print dialog contains the Color Management and Output printing options. The Output options are accessed through the pull-down menu at the top of the screen. Fortunately, these options are not necessary for printing to an inkjet printer and can be set at their default settings. This allows you to focus your attention on the Color Management options.
Step 6 At the top of the column below the Color Management heading you will see your document ICC profile listed. Verify that your document has an embedded ICC profile, and then proceed to the Color Handling options.
Step 7 From the Color Handling pull- down menu, select Photoshop Manages Colors. This will give you complete control over the color management options and the best prints from your printer.
Step 8 From the Printer Profile pull-down menu, select the ICC profile that matches the printer and paper combination you’re using. Next, set the Rendering Intent to Relative Colorimetric with Black Point Compensation checked.
Step 9 Click Print to leave Photoshop and enter the printer manufacturer’s Print dialog. See the earlier section, “Navigating the Print Driver,” for recommendations on settings and options within the print driver.
Advanced
Printing Options
The troubleshooting instructions will help you print reliably in a wide variety of circumstances on most any commercially available inkjet paper. Inkjet printers are, for the most part, remarkably consistent. Once you configure the printer’s settings, you can feel comfortable that a print you make today will look the same as one made a month from now.
Once you’ve established this printing foundation, you may want to explore different paper finishes and weights, try printing in black and white, and create your own ICC profiles for maximum color accuracy. This section will help you on your path toward printing mastery.
Selecting Papers
Today’s inkjet printers give you the option of printing on hundreds of different papers, each with slightly different finishes, weights, colors, and textures. For snapshot and portfolio prints, your best bet is often choosing an inexpensive, good-looking paper and using
it for the majority of your printing. For important prints, it pays to spend some time matching the paper type with the content
of the photo. For example, the feeling of a dreamy cloudscape will be enhanced by a cotton-rag paper with a velvety smooth finish, such as the Moab Entrada Rag Bright 190. A moody black and white texture study of rock formations will feel rougher when printed
on a watercolor paper that isn’t smooth, such as the Arches Infinity Textured Finish paper. For pictures like these, the paper adds an additional dimension to the visual feel of the photo. By seeing the texture of the paper, we feel the textures in the photo.
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On the Web
Unfortunately, there is no easy, or inexpensive, way to test all papers on the market to find
With pigmented inks, the individual fragments of pigment are encapsulated in a carrier medium that protects the pigment
the one that will work best for you. To help narrow the search, I’ve compiled a list of paper characteristics to look for when evaluating paper types. Jay Dickman and I posted a listing of our favorite papers at www perfectdigitalphotography.com/printing.php.
Paper Finish
With traditional photo printing, you had two options for printing your photos: glossy or matte. Today the options are seemingly
infinite. You can choose between glossy, matte, luster, semi-gloss, smooth rag, or textured rag.
The list continues into esoteric papers such as bamboo, mulberry, and silk. Choosing the correct paper finish is both a technical and aesthetic decision.
From the technical perspective, certain printers and ink types perform best on papers designed specifically for the ink delivery method. For example, most dye-based inkjet printers require the use of a paper with a swellable coating. When the ink droplet reaches the page, it is absorbed by the paper, causing the micropores on the surface of the paper to close, encapsulating the ink droplet within the paper surface. If a paper does not contain a swellable coating on the surface, the dye ink is exposed to the elements and quickly fades. For best results from dye-based printers, be sure the paper is manufactured specifically for your printer’s ink type.
from the environment, maintaining a long archival life regardless of the paper used. This makes pigment-based printers more versatile for photographers wanting to experiment with different paper types and finishes.
Another factor to consider when selecting among glossy or semi-gloss paper types is whether or not these papers will display a
gloss differential, sometimes called bronzing. Bronzing is most commonly seen when viewing prints at an oblique angle. Areas of the photo with a high concentration of ink, such as deep shadows, appear metallic, often with a copper color. Bronzing isn’t usually visible when viewing the print head-on, as you normally would, but it can be seen as you walk past a print. This is most commonly seen on glossy or semi-gloss prints made on
pigment-based printers. For this reason, many photographers prefer to use luster, satin, or semi-gloss papers on pigment-based printers. Dye-based inks are less frequently affected by this problem because the inks are absorbed by the paper and therefore don’t create a reflective surface on the paper.
Aesthetically speaking, you want to select a paper finish to complement your photo’s content. Selecting a heavily textured paper
for a softly lit portrait of a young girl at play would be as incongruous as playing heavy metal music in a fancy restaurant. Bright, vivid colors are best suited to semi-gloss, pearl, or
luster finishes, as these papers have a wider color gamut and a deep black for maximum contrast.
Softer images, muted colors, and black and white photos reproduce well on cotton rag, watercolor, or other matte papers. Matte papers have a wide variety of finishes from smooth to heavily textured, so be sure to examine the paper finish carefully before buying. Papers with a smooth finish are more subdued, making them more versatile. When printing on matte papers, you will often need to boost the saturation of your photos and add contrast to your shadows and preserve shadow detail. Matte papers absorb ink, particularly
in the deep shadows, causing shadow details to bleed together unless there is sufficient contrast.
Paper Color
If you carefully examine a half-dozen different inkjet papers, you will be surprised at the differences in paper color. While it is natural to think of these papers as white, very few are truly neutral. Some contain a blue tint, while others are more yellow, making them warmer. The paper color imparts a subtle, yet tangible accent to your photos. A slightly blue paper often appears brighter than a pure white or
yellow paper, yet a warmer paper is often better for portrait photography.
Some matte papers are very yellow, almost cream colored, and their use evokes an antique quality, similar to a sepia tone.
Paper Weight
The physical weight of a paper, often listed in grams per square meter (g/m2), is an indication of the paper thickness and density.
The heaviest papers—watercolor, rag, and other matte papers—impart a sense of quality, elegance, and durability to photos.
Heavy papers above 250 g/m2 are too thick to run through the normal paper path on your printer. Instead, they need to be fed flat through the back of the printer. Most higher quality photo printers have a special paper
feed for printing on heavy materials. Be sure to indicate the correct paper type and paper path in your print driver to ensure that the paper is fed correctly into your printer.
Optical Brightening Agents
Optical brightening agents (OBAs), sometimes called bluing agents, are added to papers to increase their apparent brightness. This can be disadvantageous for archival prints, as the OBAs can diminish over time, causing the print to dull. OBAs can also cause prints to change color in different light sources and can
complicate the creation of custom ICC profiles for printing. Whenever possible, select papers without OBAs for fine-art printing. Look in the paper’s specification sheet to determine whether a paper contains OBAs.
Printing Black and White
The last photographers slowly making the transition from film to digital are dedicated black and white photographers. The primary reason for their slow adoption to digital is
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not the lack of tools for image processing, but the inferior quality of digital black and white prints. For years, digital photographers struggled to achieve the neutrality, contrast, and richness found in traditional black and white prints. The latest round of inkjet printers and specially formulated papers are quickly winning converts from traditional darkroom printing.
Three primary attributes are necessary to create a digital black and white print— neutrality, detail throughout the tonal range, and dmax:
■ Neutrality Only the most trained eyes can discern subtle variances in rich colors, but even a novice photographer can see slight color shifts in a black and white image. This makes printing black and white images using cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks particularly
problematic. Any imperfection in the mix of inks imparts a color cast to the photo. For many years, digital black and white photographers were forced to purchase separate printers and specialized ink sets to ensure neutral black and white prints. The most recent printers from HP, Epson, and Canon are changing this, allowing photographers to make beautiful black and white and color prints from the
same printer, without any specialized equipment.
■ Detail Another frustration with digital black and white prints has been the
lack of deep shadow detail. Frequently, deep shadows would print as pure black,
limiting the effective tonal range of the printer. This was particularly problematic as the foundation of most outstanding black and white images is the detail in the shadows. This has been largely remedied in modern printers. Any remaining issues can easily be corrected in Photoshop using the “Zone System Test for Printers,” discussed a bit later in the chapter.
■ Dmax Traditionally measured with a densitometer, the dmax, or maximum density, is used to indicate the darkest black achievable on a given printer, paper, and ink combination. Since the white of the paper (dmin) is fixed, the deeper the maximum density, the wider the contrast range available to the photographer. When comparing prints from different printers or papers, compare samples of maximum black, RGB 0, 0, 0. This will help you determine whether this printer and paper combination is well-suited for black and white printing. Deeper, richer blacks create powerful shadows in the print and serve as a visual anchor for the midtones and the highlights, making your photo appear more dynamic and lifelike.
The digital solution to these issues is the use of multiple gray ink cartridges. Instead of printing the entire tonal range using a mixture of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, many inkjet printers today use black ink for the shadows, a mid-gray for midtones, and one or more gray inks for midtones and highlights. Additionally, many printers offer a matte black ink option for the best dmax on matte papers.
For example, my Epson 2880 uses either a matte black or photo black depending upon the paper type, and it adds a light black and a
light-light black to improve detail and neutrality through the midtones and highlights.
You can also improve the quality of your black and white prints by creating a custom ICC profile for your printer. This improves the color conversions between Photoshop and your printer driver, resulting in more neutral prints and better shadow detail. I discuss the creation of custom ICC print profiles in the next section.
If you haven’t tried printing black and white on today’s inkjet printers, give it another try. More than likely, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the quality of the prints and
the tonal control Photoshop and Lightroom give you. To get the very best from your inkjet printer, be sure to read the How To on applying the Zone System for digital printing at the end of this chapter.
Go Big! Image Upsampling in Photoshop
The increased affordability of large-format printers has led photographers to begin using these tools to make oversized prints from their digital photos. Whereas a 16 × 20 inch print used to be among the largest size printed, photographers today can print 44 × 55 from a single file and go even larger with panoramic photos.
No digital SLR creates files natively large enough for printing at such enormous sizes. Photographers need to upsample their photos
to reach the final image size for printing. As you might expect, having read this far into the book, you can use some tricks to improve the quality of upsampled images in Photoshop.
Upsampling is the process of enlarging a photo’s image size by adding pixels. Adding pixels can degrade the image quality, so the process is best avoided unless it’s absolutely necessary. To help you maintain image quality while upsampling, I’ll begin this section by demonstrating the base upsampling technique, and then I’ll show you variations to use when upsampling images to more than 400 percent of their original size.
Your upsampling results will depend on the following:
■ Image sharpness and focus When upsampling images, you need a sharp, well-focused image. During the upsampling process, Photoshop attempts to add pixels in a way that preserves the integrity of edges and maintains detail. It does this by evaluating the RGB values of surrounding pixels, and then adds a pixel of like color and tone. The sharper your images are to begin with, the
more accurate Photoshop will be in this process. When upsampling, a sharp photo doesn’t give marginally better results than a soft image; it gives exponentially better results.
■ Image quality In addition to a sharp photo, you’ll get the best results when your image is free from image noise, chromatic aberration, or other imaging problems. These flaws become magnified
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many times in a large print. A colored highlight caused by chromatic aberration along a high contrast edge may be barely perceptible in the original file, but it will be easy to see in a large print. Make sure you’ve carefully scrutinized your photo at 100 percent view before beginning the upsampling process.
■ Bit depth The upsampling process gives better results from a high-bit image. Export your image from Lightroom as a 16-bpc image for the upsampling process.
If your image meets these three criteria, it is a good candidate for upsampling. One of the great advantages of digital capture over film is the ability to upsample digitally created images without a significant loss of detail. In a recent test, I used a variety of methods to upsample an image 800 percent and was stunned by how good the results were. I could never have made enlargements this big from my film images!
Upsampling: Base Method
Open an image you want to upsample into Photoshop.
Step 1 Duplicate the background layer by pressing cmd-j (Mac) or ctrl-j (Windows)—or, if you have a layered image, create a separate, merged layer exactly as you would for sharpening by pressing cmd-option-shift-e (Mac) or
ctrl-alt-shift-e (Windows). To maintain quality during the upsampling process, you’ll need to add some sharpening to preserve detail. It is helpful to perform this sharpening on a separate layer for flexibility.
Step 2 Using Smart Sharpen or Unsharp Mask, add a light amount of sharpening to the image. I typically use Smart Sharpen set to an Amount around 100 and a Radius at around 0.5. The sharpening helps improve the definition of edges in the photo, making upsampling more effective.
Step 3 After applying the sharpening, change the layer blending mode from Normal to Luminosity. This prevents the sharpening from exaggerating any chromatic aberration or color fringing in the image.
Step 4 In the Image Size dialog box (Image > Image Size), make sure Resample Image is checked, and then change the units in the Document Size fields from inches to percent. Enter 150 in the Width or Height field to enlarge the image 150 percent.
By enlarging the photo in 150 percent increments, you get a smoother, more natural-looking image than performing a big enlargement in one step. If you are
enlarging your photo less than 150 percent the original size, enter the desired image size in the Width, Height, and Resolution fields. Finally, change the Resampling method from Bicubic to Bicubic Smoother and click OK.
Step 5 Repeat steps 2 and 4 until you reach your desired image size. If your image size does not fall exactly on a 150 percent increment, simply enter the remaining values into the Width, Height, and Resolution fields. For example, you may perform three passes of sharpening and enlarging (150 percent, 150 percent, and 120 percent) to reach your final image size.
Step 6 Mask out any areas that have become too sharp as a result of multiple passes of sharpening.
This technique works very well for upsampling images up to 400 percent. Once you go above a 400 percent enlargement, you need to begin adding contrast in addition
to sharpness and increase the Radius setting in either Smart Sharpen or Unsharp Mask. Since the original detail has been enlarged considerably, a Radius setting of 0.5 will
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the threshold to remove the sharpening from areas of smooth tone that may be negatively impacted by additional rounds of sharpening.
Tip As you continue enlarging the photo, you will find yourself working on a very large file, several gigabytes in size. Opening, closing, and saving such a large file can become
problematic, particularly on an older computer or one with insufficient RAM. I tend to work on big enlargements in the evening so I can adjust the image size, leave the computer for 30 to 45 minutes, and then come back for the pass. Once your file surpasses 2 gigabytes, you will need to save your photo in Photoshop’s Large Document Format (PSB).
Note Many older Windows machines use NTFS (Windows NT+ File System) formatting for their hard drives. NTFS-formatted drives cannot store a file larger than 2GB in size. If you encounter this problem, you can save your photo to an external hard drive instead of your computer’s internal hard drive.
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Step 3 Click the image near the area of most important detail.This will create a selection at the size of your detail proof.
To create a detail proof in Photoshop, follow these steps:
Step 1 After performing your upsampling and other image corrections, duplicate your photo (Image > Duplicate).
Step 2 Select the Rectangular Marquee tool from the Toolbox, and then, in the Options bar, set the Style to Fixed Size and enter the dimensions for your detail proof.
Step 4 Crop the photo to the selected area (Image > Crop).This crops the photo to the correct size for printing your detail proof.
If you are printing to a wide-format printer using roll paper, you may want to print a strip of the image to serve as your detail proof. For example, if you are printing on a 24-inch roll, you can set your Rectangular Marquee to 8 × 24 inches, creating a short banner from the full image.
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H OW T O : P RINTING F INE A R T FROM P HOTOSHOP
While color management is a powerful tool to help streamline the printing process and dramatically improve print consistency, it cannot fully account for many aspects of the human visual system. For the best fine art prints, you will often need to make a test print to evaluate tone, color, contrast, and sharpness at the final print size.
Zone System Test for Printers
Frequently, inkjet printers are unable to print detail in the deepest shadows, causing them to print as solid black. For photos with important shadow detail,
particularly black and white images, you’ll want to adjust the tonal range within your photo to match the printable tonal range of the paper and printer combination you use. This clipping is sometimes visible in a soft proof with the Black Ink option enabled. Your most accurate tool for assessing shadow clipping will be a test target to help you determine the exact point at which your printer is unable to reproduce deep shadow detail. You can then correct your image prior to printing to ensure that all
the highlight and shadow detail in your photo will be present in the finished print.
A good print target contains a combination of synthetic tests to assess specific image attributes, such as shadow detail or gray balance, and a handful of images to see how the printer reproduces actual images. I’ve created this test target to assess the black and white printing capabilities of various papers and ICC profiles.
The white and gray swatches at the bottom of the target are designed to test a printer’s
On the Web ability to hold detail in extreme highlights
and shadows. If you’d like to incorporate these patches into your test target, you can download the target at www.perfectdigitalphotography.com/printing.php.
Examining the target closely, you’ll find both a numbered swatch corresponding to a specific print density and a continuous gradient to help you assess the smoothness of transitions between tones.
Step 1
Print the test target exactly the same way you would any other print, and look for the darkest two blocks contain- ing visible separation between them. Ideally, this will be
between 0 and 2 percent. More often, you’ll find separa- tion between 4 and 6 percent. Note this on the file.
Step 2
Examine the corresponding gradient, looking for any abrupt transitions or breaks in the continuity of the
gradient. There should be a smooth transition from one tone to the other.
Step 3
Repeat steps 1 and 2 for the highlight blocks, making a note of the first highlight block separate from paper white.
Step 4
In Photoshop, use the soft proof feature to proof your test target using the ICC profile you use for printing.
Check to see whether or not the preview correctly displays the loss of detail at the highlight and shadow
ends. If not, you will need to adjust the tonal range of the image to match the printable range of your printer.
Step 5
Switch from the test target to the photo you want to print. Select the topmost layer in your document and
then create a new Levels Adjustments layer. Here, you’ll adjust the Output Levels to contract the tonal range of
your photo to match your printable tonal range. Unfortu- nately, this requires a little math. Calculate the difference between the absolute highlight or shadow end and the
actual end of the tonal range, and then multiply by 2.5 to translate the percentages used in the charts to the
0–255 scale used in Photoshop. For example, if your first shadow appears between 4 and 6 percent, average the
two numbers and then multiply that by 2.5 to calculate
the correction needed. In this example 5 × 2.5 = 12.5, or 13, since Photoshop works only in whole numbers. Enter 13 in the Shadows portion of the Output Levels field.
Step 6
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Repeat the calculations for the highlights and enter the
difference in the highlight field to the right of the Output Levels field of the Levels dialog. In my example, the print showed highlight detail between 96 and 98 percent, so I set my highlight levels adjustment at 248. The average of 96 and 98 = 97. 100 – 97 = 3, and 3 × 2.5 = 7.5. In this
case, I rounded down to allow a few highlights to print as pure white to preserve some of the contrast range of the photo.
After performing this correction, I could see that my image lost a little midtone contrast. I restored this by adding a Curves adjustment to boost contrast in the
midtones, being careful not to adjust the deep shadows or extreme highlights.
You may wish to experiment with different numbers in the Output Levels correction depending on image content. If you have bright specular highlights or deep silhouetted shadows, you’ll want those to print as pure white or full black. Go ahead and leave the Output Levels set at 0 for those images. Most other images fall somewhere in between. Use the images included on your test target as a guide for your corrections.
Feel free to apply an Output Levels correction to the test target and reprint it. Compare the quality of the corrected images in the second target to the uncorrected images in the first. This will help you determine what, if any, correction is necessary for your printer and paper.
I find this technique most useful when printing to a watercolor or other highly absorbent matte paper, where the loss of shadow detail is significant. As you continue to develop as a photographer, you’ll be better able to predict the corrections necessary for creating a great print every time