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Final Steps in Printing

okay if I'm gonna print in photo shop like I say, one of things I got to do is I got to apply some level of sharpening. So the Knicks suite has a output sharpening tool. There's a company called, uh, pixel genius. They create one called pixel sharpener. The one I prefer is the peak a genius? One? Because that technology was sold to Adobe and what was incorporated in the light room on basically what they Whatever they run, which everyone you pick, you have to know just a couple of decisions. So if I run the external output sharpening from PK photo, it's gonna pop up. It's gonna ask me just a couple of questions. Am I actually at the final output size? So if I'm printing a 14 by 9.5 image at 300 d. P. I, it's just like I'm sharpening for that. Remember the size of the print resolution and then what? A My printing, too. Well, I'm pretty doing inkjet printer, and, um, I pointed to matter glossy. If it's pearl satin and the that has got any amount of sheen to it, it's glossy, and that's all...

I got to know his matte and glossy Matt look OK, Then they give me a group, and they've customized the light and dark contours they've applied blend sliders, so it's only impacting shadows and highlights. Which works happened there? Nick Plug in does the same thing. Topaz. Any of those plug ins for output sharp into a very similar thing. If I run the actual filter Ah, for Nick, get down here in the background. You'll see I get the same set of questions. Mining Jet. What's my viewing distance in this case and my printing on Matt Glossy canvas. What's my printer resolution? How big is my print? Some basic questions when I click apply so I don't have to worry about all that's math that I can't do. I'm a photographer, not a mathematician. I'm very glad there are mathematicians who worked for Adobe Do all that for me. What's I got that output sharpening? I made love soft, perfect adjustments, output sharpening, and I'm gonna go to the print menu about two options here. Printer manages color photo shop managers colored. If I choose Photoshopped manages color, I can come in and then I'm on the wrong printer choose the right printer, photo shop managers color, and then I can come in and pick the appropriate profile. If I saw proved the hot press bright and I choose hot press natural in print, it's not gonna look right. Whatever you saw proof, too. You have to match Black Point compensation. I also needed to turn on and then my rendering intent needs to match. If I selected perceptual in the sock proof, I need to choose perceptual in the print dialog box because that's what I was fixing. So those all have to match. If I'm doing black and white now, I'm going to Ah, Canon printer. I'm going on Epson printer. I choose printer manages. Color is the one difference kind of between. That is if I come in here to the and this is for an Epson printer. But if I choose a printer setting, they've got this advanced black and white mode. Canon has a very similar advanced black and white mode in their print driver as well. When we're printing for that, it actually takes the information and puts it through ah, kind of a variation of what's called a quad tone rip, which was a different way of laying down in a different way, understanding the information. And they have spent unseen amount of time and energy to make sure that the black and white quality is at or exceeds with. They were tempted to in the silver gelatin world, so better than the paper profile. These print modes of advanced black and white for Canon and Epson both will are significantly better for your actual output. The thing that's going on in here is there's a number of curves that are actually being applied into the various gray inks at different levels. So they're being applied. They're coming in for that. You can also come in and do some toning in here and absent in light Cannon. Both now have plug ins that actually work in photo shopped to print out up to control all of this information as well. And those both work great. The other thing that I think is important this for calling out if I'm printing black and white imagery. I printed a 28 80 dp. I never imprinted color printer 14 40 the reason for that is it is tonal. Gradation is so critical in black and white photography that the additional ink that's being put down actually helps with the smoothness of the transitions for 16 bit data. Some printers except 16 bit data. Some don't most. The new ones dio that just sends a little bit more information. The printer. It's one of those if you lay down two prints images side by side, Sometimes you can see a subtle difference in the great Asian. Sometimes you can't as your eye gets more sophisticated, more trained, you'll more likely see that, and then you're gonna go on ahead and click print. If you've done all of that, the prints going to be pretty close. You need to print multiple times to get to that final print. There is no one, and done clicking with as good a soft proofing is as good as the display monitors are because have those difference in gametes and compressions and things like that. So with the soft proofing, once you get the handle on it, you'll be in the range of somewhere between probably five and eight prints to get to a final image and when printing ah, few pictures to make sure it's right. Um, if it doesn't come out right away. Can you go smaller? And do you compromise in terms of what you see, if you don't print full sides? Great question. The in general, you I usually start off with a smaller print and trying to make sure that my corrections air pretty close because the only thing I would need to reprocess then once I move up to the larger size would be the sharpening again. So but I often times worked smaller to start and then move up to the bigger paper. I also, if I have a big image and I'm worried about a certain part, like on this image, if I was worried about just that one center leaf, I might print just the center leaf. Um, And use that as even though it's the bigger size image already. I'm just gonna print a section and just that little section just to see. How's that looking as well? Okay, we jump over the light room real quick. Let me grab a different image. I want to wrap this. It means we can take a look at this. I'm gonna come into the print module. Um, and one of the great things about printed on a light rooms. I've got lots of options for Ah, presets over here. One of great things about the presets is that remember your pace up on your print settings as well, so you can come in and get all that set. Save yourself a preset. So if you've got a certain paper, you're putting on a certain size customized going ahead and use the preset there and you come in. If you want to change some things like, say, a maximum size, whatever I'm doing in regards to that, you've got a couple offense up here. Resume to fill that does all tiny little bit of a crop zoom. I don't ever yearly like Zoom to fill because I want to make the crop decision. So, sizing wise, I'd go back into the village and module set the crop aspect ratio, but that's a choice for whoever is printing. But for me, I don't want like this. I do that. Then rotate to fit. Will rotated. Is this orientation size changes for margins determined left right, top bottom. One of the interesting things about a lot of printers is, though, because I got to grab the paper, so if you're putting on a roll, it will be different than on paper. But a lot times I got to grab the edge of the paper to pull it through, where the printers will have these little fingers that, like tickle across that determines the borderless printing so sometimes would be like the bottom margins always 10.56 or 0. Or and that's because it's gotta have enough to grab the paper to pull it through. So just you would have to take that into account. It'll drive you crazy when you first get started with your printer cell size so I can the increase or decrease the cell size this next section. The most important part, I think when you're doing the printing is whether you're in photo shopper in light room. Of the other questions I get asked a lot is what's the print resolution size in general, we want to be around 303 60 dependent, which printer you're on, but anything above 200. Most people cannot see any degradation and quality, So as long as my uh PP I can stay above 200 I'm pretty good to go to print. I am. I've convinced myself I can see the difference between to 200 to 40. I convinced myself, but I don't necessarily think that's true. Above 200. And don't worry about re sampling the image. Isn't that also an issue of the, um resulting size of the of the print? Yeah, we Did they ever factory doors there 300 feet by 80 feet. It was a fit like 15. 25 DP I Yeah, because you're viewing it from sweeter readers. Yes, So that that definitely makes a huge difference in terms of the size billboard. Our same thing, like a 10 d p I. But from a distance, they look perfectly normal. Proofs were 20 feet long and three feet wide. I need a printer like that, um, and then you get to hang him up and maybe like they rotated. Um, So what I've got turned on under the guides is a bunch of the rulers. The Amy sighs, But the dimension one at the bottom is the one that's important to me, because I check on that. It will actually tell me the current resolution if I go to print this because light room's gonna resize to fit the frame and all that kind of stuff so imprinted on a 11 by 17 piece of paper here and this image is gonna print it to 65 pixels prints. So I'm not gonna worry about re sampling and re sizing. The only way to see that is to have that dimensions turned on. So that's one of the pieces there when we get down to the actual where we're gonna go to print, this is that print resolution check box. So if that's checked and it sets a to 40 doesn't matter what resolution has it takes it to 2 40 The only time I'm gonna turn that on, just like in photo shop the only time I would resize the images. If that's gonna fall below that 200 mark, I'm gonna notice the change. And then I mentioned that that PK sharpener technology was in light room starting in the light room. Media type matter glossy and then print sharpening standard low and high 99% of the time. You're gonna be fine with standard this image I use low for because it has such soft gradations I don't want to hyper sharp in any of those gradations at all. Actually, the Mawr smooths out the happier I am. Hi. If I have a high textured image like these tires, I would potentially set that too high, cause I want to make sure I get those. I just set really hard. I can come down here, set my paper profile again, just like normal. If you answer your question from earlier, if I'm gonna want to go into that advanced black and white mode like I saw before under profile, I just choose managed by printer. Then when I come into printer, I come in here and I will have the option to come in and select that same advanced black and white sitting here. But I've got to select the manage my printer there. The difference between print and printer down here is if I click printer, it goes to print dialog box. I can double check all the settings and I got a printer. Just assumes everything is good and it's ready to go. This print adjustment is there because of the technology of soft proofing, were able to come in and make an adjustment here of my print was too dark. I want to brighten it. I can't see it on the screen. So I'm just gonna guess and hope I This is one of my my own world. If the prince coming out to dark, I'm gonna recalibrate my screen and get the brightness factor set there. And if the contrast is off, I'm gonna go back to the development module into my proof and fix it there because I'm not going to remember the next time I came back. Oh, yeah, I just the contrast up 12 points. I'd rather fix the image and not make the adjustment here. Um, but if your prints you here just in brightness, it's a screen resolution problem. Okay, so that's the little world of excitement there. What I'm gonna do now is I've got some prints, so we've got our prints made. So when I spent a couple of minutes talking about a few things from printing open, I do have one thing. Before we do that, I have something in the download. Get it open for you. I created a file for you guys. Um, because to test paper, we need to know a couple of things. We need to know how. Grady, it's deal how saturated colors deal. And then we don't know how white on black points deal. So if we get back down to this point, this is a to 55 paper white. And then I dropped one point all the way down to 2 44 you can start to see where the color will appear. Same thing with the black. What point is black render? This is a Macbeth color checker that's actually coated to the Macbeth colors. Um, posterized, black and white posterized colors. So it's information to help you assess what you're gonna do. Replace this with your image. There's gonna be three in the photo shop file that you can download. There's three of these squares. You put your own photograph in there, and then you use this to test your papers so you get the sample pack. It's got 10 papers in there. You print this same image over and over again because what people use it with Osama packers are like, Oh, a print. This that would be cool. And print this on that school. You need to compare apples to apples So this is going to help you get apples to apples. There's just three layers in there. You just replace with your own image. When you do that, we'll end up with paper pieces. So if you do this, you can see I've got the same image. I've got my great Asian image. I've got a black in a way they made in the highly saturated color image. I treat the file. You got the new version. I give you the old version. You guys get the new one and every paper pack I get. I run through this and then when I need to make a paper decision, I can come look at these and be like, Oh, this handles the gradations. Nice has handled the black and white. Nice word is black appear disappear. So in this image ah, Black starts to show up at about eight. But on this image, it really shows up in about 12. So I would just knowing the compression for that. So you need to consider if when you choose the actual images you're putting in there, so what? That's a great question. Whatever you normally photograph is what you're gonna want to put in there. So in my world, like I do black and white and I do a lot of landscape cityscape work, so that's there. If I was a portrait photographer, I would have three portrait's in there for three different skin tones. Potentially so you wanna have whatever's in there is what you would normally photograph. And if you're a person who's does say you have a lot of high saturated colors but less saturated colors, you would want a high saturated image in a kind of a muted image, just kind of a preference there.