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Printing with Lightroom

So let's now get into the nitty-gritty about printing. So this is fun. This is where we actually get to make a final print. We've made quite a few today. I think we've made, how many? Seven? One, two, three, four, five, six, and this will be our seventh one that we'll make today. I'm gonna print one that we know and love. It's my favorite from this whole event. Right there. So let's just review the whole process. Got my files from my camera. I selected all nine of them. I developed them. I made them look pretty. I'm happy with the contrast. I did my global adjustments. I did my local adjustments. I fixed the dust, okay? All of that's ready to go. I did my noise reduction, if necessary. And then, finally, I did my sharpening. Actually, on this image I didn't do my sharpening. So let's do a little bit of sharpening, and then we're gonna do the print. So I think on this one a good setting here is... Yeah. 75ish. Radius of one. Cut down on the detail a little bit 'cause I see some noise sh...

owing up. And then masking. Hold down my Alt key and just kinda do edges of buildings. Okay. And now I'm gonna zoom in to 100%. I'll just check that everything looks copasetic and good, and I'm happy with that. Just turned it off. And now I turned it back on. And I'm happy with that amount of sharpening. Okay. Now it's time to print. So printing is hard. I'll just be honest with y'all, printing is really hard. Printing your own images on an inkjet printer takes a lot of patience and a lot of trial and error. And my goal today is to help prevent a lot of your mistakes. So hopefully you can follow what I'm doing here and prevent costly mistakes, inkjet jams, and color mismatches, all that stuff. Hopefully we're gonna solve all that for you. But this next part is where a lot of confusion really lies, and it's in the print module, and it happens in the printer driver. So we're gonna now go over here to print. So that's the printer module. And this is Lightroom, again. So in Lightroom there are basically four areas that we have to adjust or prepare for printing. So before I show you those, I wanna head back to keynote because I've actually laid them out in a list for you all to look at. And if you've bought the workshop, I think this is in our bonus material as your Lightroom printing checklist. Basically, everything that you have to think of in Lightroom and make sure to set up properly. So first thing is page setup. That's an actual button in Lightroom. I'm gonna show you that in a minute. You have to choose the printer, you have to choose the paper size, and you have to choose the orientation, landscape versus vertical within the paper. The next are the print settings. Again, this is another button. So we're gonna go through the print settings. We're gonna check the feed. Like where is the paper coming from? Is it sheet fed? Is it roll fed? The paper style. The quality of printing: low, medium, or high quality printing. How many copies do you want to make? And then is this a black and white or a color? And as funny as it sounds, I forget that all the time. I forget whether or not I'm printing a black and white or color. Actually, I forget to check the box. And so sometimes I send it to print it and out comes a black and white, and I'm like aw, my mistake. Number three: the Lightroom panels. There's a whole segment of panels that we have to go through and make sure all of that's set properly. And then finally the printer. So that's another button. So we're gonna go click printer and then we have to confirm the settings and then finally actually execute to print or hit print. So let's do that. We'll head back in here into Lightroom and I'll take you through that process. So here's our print. And you can see that what Lightroom did is it took the image that we've worked on and it threw it on wherever the current printer settings were last used. So if I had an eight 1/2 by 11 print that I was making, it would have put this panorama onto that little piece of paper, and it would have looked funny. So that's where we go to page setup. And that's in the lower left-hand side of Lightroom. So we click on page setup. So here in page setup we have a number of pull-down menus. And I wanna make this point: Your printer and your printer driver and your printer software is gonna look totally different than this. And I know that, and I know I can't answer everyone's questions about what about my Epson or what about my Canon 'cause every single printer driver's different. This is what I've got here with this little Epson. This is the P600. Okay, so what do we wanna format the print for? Well, here are the current printers that I have installed on my system. We've got my brother. This is my office, scanner, fax machine, and black and white printer. Well, I'm not gonna use that. Here's the Epson SC-P600 series. This is over WiFi. This one here is over USB, same printer but over USB. And then for some reason I have this HP Color LaserJet. I don't know where that one came from. Who knows? I'm not gonna print to that one, so... We'll choose our Epson that's in the room. Next, what's the paper size? Okay, so the printer paper that we currently have on this guy is a 13-inch-wide paper. So it's 13 inches wide by, oh man, I'm gonna say it's like 50 feet long. That's how long that roll is. So I have to tell it what this photo is that's going to go to the printer. And you can see here that I've already pre-entered these certain aspect ratios of prints. So 13 by 39, that's one unit to three units, right? So 13 inches high by 39 inches wide. And that's what I crop this image to was a one to three crop. So I'm gonna pick my 13 by 39. Orientation, how do you want the photo to be oriented on that paper? Do you want it horizontal or, well, in this case, it's not changing it for some reason. Okay. Normally, it does. It'll flip it. It might be such a big file that it's just too slow on the response. So and now I'm gonna click okay. Interesting. So when I did that it reverted back to an odd-sized paper choice. And this, I said it before, printing is hard. Your software does stuff like this all the time and I never quite understand why, you know? I just it for 13 by 39. Why'd it go back to this other, which looks like a two to one aspect ratio? Okay, just be patient. Go back to page setup. Choose 13 by 39. And for some reason, you see down below here? For some reason it says 13 by 27 inches even though it's in my 13 by 39 preset. I don't know why that happened, so I'm gonna go into manage custom sizes, and I'm actually go in and change it. Again, 13 by 39, 39 inches with no margins left, right, bottom, or top. Okay, so I click okay and I click okay. There we go. So there's my paper. Well, what's the problem? Well, for some reason the software didn't automatically resize the print to the paper. So, again, another moment of frustration like ah, what do I do next? It's okay. So this is where I move over here to the right side to these panels. You see over here in the layout segment it says where do you want your margins to be and then what do you want your cell size to be? Well, I'm gonna move my margins down to zero 'cause I'd like zero margins. And then cell size, I want the height and the width to be maximum for that paper size. So now you can see in my preview I've got no white strips around the edges. And if you get white strips around your edges, you know that you didn't format this layout segment properly. All right. And now I'm gonna go back to the left and I go to print settings. Again, choose the printer. The Epson sounds good to me. Default settings. The default settings here shows that I'm printing a black and white print. I don't wanna do that. I want this to be the color print. You know why it says black and white is because you asked for the black and white print and that's what we did. So I'm gonna uncheck that. Next is for the media and quality, where does the paper come from? Well, I'm gonna choose the roll. So I've got a roll feeder on the back of that printer. So that's where the paper's coming from. And then, finally, what's the paper type? Well, it comes pre-programed with these general paper types. So photo satin, photo mat, glossy, semi-glossy. You can also download the paper types from the manufacturer and include those here as other options, but for now it's photo satin. I'm cool with that. And then, finally, quality. Do you want a normal quality or the best quality? Well, we're all about the best, so best, baby. Here we go. Save. So now that saves that. Now we're gonna move to the right. More panel talk. Lightroom has a whole bunch of different ways to make prints. So up here in the top we can do a single image, which is what we've got, or we can do a picture package where we can make like a bunch of five by sevens, eight by 10s, eight 1/2 by 11, you can make this picture package and then save those as JPEGs and send 'em off to your laboratory. And they make out a bunch of these, on one sheet of paper a bunch of four by sixes, five by sevens, and eight by 10s as one big package. We're not gonna do that today. Image settings. Well, we wanna zoom to fill, yes. And we wanna rotate to fit. You know, if we don't rotate to fit, you see what happened there? It rotated the thing horizontal on a vertical piece of paper, and we get a little strip of the panorama. That's not what we want. Repeat one photo per page. That's if you're making multiple prints. We're not doing that. Do you want a stroke on the print? In other words, like a little black line around the edge, or a little white line. Not for this one, but if you do you can program that there. We already talked about the layout. So I moved the margins to zero. And then grid, this is where I could actually put in multiple panoramas or multiple images. So like I could do something like that and then repeat that panorama multiple times on this, I forget how long this was, 39 inches. So we'd have four prints that are each smaller. Again, we don't wanna do that. Cell size, that was the most important one. And so I think the biggest tip I have for you in the studio and those watching at home is if your print looks funky like that, then change your cell size sliders until they fill up the entire cell like that. All right, show guides, that's just a visual reference here at the top of the scene. If you wanna see the actual inch guides, great. Do you wanna put an identity plate or a water marker, anything else on there, you do that here under page. And now we get to the bottom print job. Okay, what are we printing to? Well, we're gonna print to a printer versus printing to a JPEG file. So if I print to the printer, it's gonna there. If I print to a JPEG file, then it will actually output a new JPEG that I can now take to the lab like Costco or Mpix or something like that. Draft mode printing, no. Because I'm pretty much ready to go full bore on this one. I want it to be high-quality. Print resolution, we talked about that earlier. So this is gonna be 39 inches long. So it's gonna be about that big. 240 pixels per inch makes sense for that. If I was going really big like six feet long I might actually move this down. I'm gonna get really technical on you here. You only have so many pixels to work with on the original image, right? And, in this case, there's quite a few. I forget what that was, 20,000 pixels. Let's make it easy math. Let's say 30,000 pixels. So if I have 30,000 pixels and I wanna print at 300 pixels per inch how many inches can I get out of that? Well, 30,000 divided by is 100 inches. So 100 inches, what is that? Eight feet or so, eight something feet. So using the same number of pixels, but using a lower resolution I can actually get more footage or a larger print. So that's another thing that we do sometimes is we're only given a certain amount of pixels in our panorama, so to go bigger I actually go lower on the resolution, so... We have all the pixels we need, though, for this image, so I'm gonna shoot it over at 240. Print sharpening, we already talked about that. Yeah, I'll activate print sharpening. I'll let Adobe do its thing. And then the last one here is 16-bit output. Haven't talked at all about this today, so this is a good time to talk about that. If I uncheck that, I would be at eight bits. In other words, I'm sending the file over to the printer with eight bits of data versus sending the file over with 16 bits of data. 16 bits, what that does is it gives you much more dynamic range. It allows more of the shadows to be printed and more of the highlight data to be retained. So if your printer has the option or ability to take 16-bit data, I recommend sending it over. Just a little point here: If you send out a JPEG, like if we said file, print to JPEG, that's only an 8-bit file. So most of your online labs when they're printing JPEGS are just using 8-bit file formats. But the cool thing about printing at home and one of the reasons I actually sometimes enjoy printing at home is because I get more color. I get more dynamic range 'cause I can actually print in 16-bit mode. That's it. You guys ready? [Audience Member] - Yes. All right. Here we go. I'm gonna open up the printer. Oh, you know what? I lied. I got one more thing. Color management. This is big one down here. There's a lot to talk about here. We could literally talk for two days about this one thing, but I'm gonna keep it simple. So you have to think about who is managing the color transition from, do y'all remember what color space we're in in Lightroom? [Audience Member] - Pro. ProPhoto. You're paying attention. You get a hug. Okay, so we're in ProPhoto land, and what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go from ProPhoto RGB into Epson P600 RGB, actually Epson P600 CMYK 'cause that's what they're using, all these different inks and papers. So who manages that, or what manages that? So do you want that to be managed by the printer or do you want to manage it through Adobe's Lightroom product? So normally I say manage by printer and it works out just fine, but sometimes I get an odd color. Sometimes I get a color shift and I'm like you know, that wasn't what I was expecting. I'm calibrated, but it just isn't quite right. So then you would actually choose, I know the paper and I know the printer, and I've actually spent time and I've profiled the whole system with my Xrite product here. And so because of that I've created a new profile, and I want that to go over. That's called application managed colors. Okay, application as in the Lightroom application is gonna manage it versus printer-managed colors. And so for this, to keep it simple, I'm gonna say printer-managed colors. And now we open up printer and we go print. Everything looks good. Off we go. See ya. All right, those take about 10 minutes to print. So as I move on to Photoshop, now we'll let that thing hum and whir.