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Lesson Info
Printing From Photoshop®
Confirm your settings. Like double and triple confirm your settings, I cannot emphasize that enough. Sometimes I'll even go through all those buttons two or three times just to make sure everything's setup, and the reason why I do that is because every time you make a print this big it's gonna cost ya two or three bucks, and I just want to make sure everything is ready to go. Oh, and than the other thing is, make sure your paper is put in the correct way. A lot of paper, it's hard to tell. In this case, this specific paper, Canon has put their logo on the back. Huh, obvious, don't print on this side. Other paper, especially like a matte paper, let's see here, all of these, yep, there we go. This paper, this is their luster, there's no logo on the back, so what side do you print on? Well what I do, is I find a bright light, and I reflect that bright light off the surface. The shinier surface is the one that you print on. Trust me, you're gonna have that problem at some point. Than when ...
everything's confirmed, your paper's setup properly, hit print and enjoy the print coming out. So let's talk about the next thing, which is I want to show you how to print from Photoshop, all right, let's print from Photoshop. All right, we'll go back to the computer, and let's print somebody else's photo. Here we go, I haven't printed, that's a black and white, I'd like to do a color. Let's print, let's print a Michael Clark photo. Michael Clark's cool. He did this class for CreativeLive, outdoor sports photography, lighting for outdoor sports, really cool class and he made this, I think about two months ago, if I'm not mistaken, and this was taken at Smith Rocks Park. I'm gonna assume that everything in this photo is ready to go, so I just want to kind of remind you where we're at. We just did the global and regional and local, all of that's ready to go, and than maybe there's something I need to do in Photoshop. Maybe there's like some cloning and burning and dodging that I have to do that you can't do in Lightroom. So then we would send this over to Photoshop and continue our process there. So, Michael, let's, I'm assuming Michael's gonna watch this at some point. Michael, just for the sake of the class, I'm not saying your photo's bad, but just for the sake of the class, I'm gonna pretend that we need Photoshop to get of that dark splotch in the sky, okay. So a seagull came by and left its little deposit on our lens. All right, here we go. So I'm gonna take this, I can right-click, and I can go Edit In, oops, Edit In, Photoshop, why is it, come on brain, or I can just drag it. So I'm just gonna drag it over to Photoshop, and here we are in Photoshop, hit Cmd + 0, Cmd + -, I need the window to be a little bit smaller. Dealing with multiple monitors with the studio monitor here. All right, and now let's just pretend that we did our work and we got rid of that cloud. I'm just gonna do a real quick selection on that cloud, and I'm just gonna do a Content-Aware fill. Okay, bingo, and I go Edit, I'm sorry, File, no Edit, Fill, and then Content-Aware fill, and then hit OK, and voilà, cloud is gone. Okay, great. I know it's hard to improve on perfection with Michael Clark, but we'll just assume. Now we're ready to print. So I'm gonna go File, Print, and now here's the print dialog inside of Photoshop. Looks entirely different. Why can't all the print dialogs look the same? So the first thing that I like to do is pick the printer. So we're gonna choose the Canon PRO-1000, and next I go into Print Settings, and you will recognize this screen, that Print Settings, that's the actual printer driver, okay. That's the print driver. That's the software from Canon that translates all the information to the printer. All right, cool. So I'm gonna pick the Paper Size 17x22, Feed from Manual Feed, that's the back, and Quality Normal, and then I'm just gonna hit Save. Awesome! Something's wrong, what's wrong? Orientation, oh, well that's the next button. Okay, that makes me happy, good. Color Management, you guys know the answer here, Printer Manages Colors or Photoshop Manages Colors. Well it's Printer, in this case, I'm gonna use the same paper that I did before, so I don't have to make any changes there. So Printer Manages Colors, Normal Printing, versus Hard Proof. A Hard Proof is like a real quick version, so we want just Normal Printing, and then, Relative Colorimetric versus Perceptual. These are rendering intents. The two that you need to know are Relative Colorimetric and then the other is Perceptual, okay. Pick either one, both are good. Sometimes you'll get a little bit, like, depends on every photo, every photo's different, sometimes you get a little more saturation with Relative, sometimes you get a little bit more accurate result with Perceptual. The idea with Perceptual is it's supposed to mimic what you, what a human likes, Perceptual. I've had good results with both. Don't use Saturation or Absolute Colorimetric, okay. So for this case, we'll just use Relative Colorimetric, and we're getting ready to make a Michael Clark print. So-- I have a question. Yeah, question. On that previous screen, it said that the Printer Profile was SRGB, and it was grayed out so you couldn't select it. Here? Just right below, there, yeah. Okay cool. So the Canon 1000 couldn't do Adobe RGB? Great question, I will answer that right after I stick in this piece of paper. What that is, if I choose Photoshop Manages the Color, now you'll see this ungrays. Now that it's ungrayed, or now it's live, what I'll do is I'll tell Photoshop the type of printer this is, and the type of paper I'm using. So right now, I've told Photoshop that I'm just gonna send SRGB data over there, and it's gonna print out in SRGB. So I actually have to make, that's just a legacy, it's a hold over, from some other decision I made maybe last month or a year ago, who knows. So what I would do now, is I'd go down here, and I'd be like, oh, I'm printing at adorama using their lab, or I'm printing on the PRO-1000 Luster, oops I clicked the wrong one, there we go, Luster, and now Photoshop is managing the colors. Did that make sense? Did that answer your question? So when I choose Printer Manages Color it grays out. It doesn't care. Doesn't care. Okay, I think we're ready, here we go, hit Print. Oh wait, before I do, we're gonna go through it one more time. Just make sure everything is selected properly. Yes, it is the 17x24. I have chosen to crop out a little bit of his beautiful image. If you don't like that crop exactly, you can move it, see how I'm moving it a little bit 'cause I want that, I want that corner of the mountain ridge to be in the frame. Cool, all right, I think I'm ready, here we go. Semi-gloss, 17x24, yep, go, oh and then Print. (laughing) And just to make I'm going from that manual feed, I'll click that again, and now Print. The image is larger than the paper's printable area, some clipping will occur. Okay, let's just see what happens. Hopefully it all comes out in the wash. All right, cool. Let me just show you this print that came out of this beautiful owl, beautiful, yeah, good job, good job Canon, good job Mike, good job depth of field, Nikon, the whole world. So we talked about Photoshop Print Settings, the Feed, the Paper type, the Quality. You know those types of, that terminology is gonna be consistent regardless of the printer driver that you use or the software that you use. We talked about color handling, the printer profile, that was your question, the SRGB, the paper type, all of that matters. Send it in 16-bit data, I don't know why I couldn't check that in Photoshop. I'll research that, figure that out, and than Rendering intent, here in the show notes, you'll see I've got Relative Colorimetric or Perceptual, either of those you're gonna use, and there's no easy answer for which one is best. If you have the time and the money, experiment, but every photos different. Sometimes some photos look better in relative and some photos look better in perceptual.
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Ratings and Reviews
Jul
Good solid fundamentals class for beginners. If you're a fairly seasoned pro wanting to refine your output techniques, you'll probably find this class too general. It concentrates on the basics of achieving a good image with a basic overview of printer settings and Adobe output dialog boxes.
Dennis Walsh
This is a good fundamentals class. Mike is an excellent teacher. If you are just starting printing, this would be a good choice. If you are more experienced at printing it is probably too shallow. I thought the price of the class was high for the time and detail of the lessons.