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Print initial image

so in my opinion printing is an incredibly important part of the image making process that's why today in this video we are going to make a print together except we're not really going to make a print because I just made this one for this video so I'm going to show you how to make a print stick around [Music] so if you're new to the world of printing or you've never done too much image prep before today I'm gonna walk you through my process of how I prepare my film scans for printing and this applies if you're printing at home or also if you're safe sending off to a lab or something and maybe in the past if you don't have much experience printing you've just sent them one of your exported images or if you're printing at home you just click print but it's definitely really important to prepare your images sizing sharpening stuff like that just to really get the most out of them when they're printed on paper okay so the first place we're gonna start today is talking about monitor calibration and we're just going to touch really really briefly on this if you have never calibrated your monitor or you don't know much about it definitely look into it read up and learn a little bit more about it and then you should definitely pick up a calibration device and run it on your monitor and basically what's happening when you're calibrating your monitor is you're using this device to take a bunch of readings the basically just hangs over your screen like this and it reads a bunch of targets and patches which are our colors and tones and it compares those against a set standard so for example let's say it's reading a red patch it's going to compare how your monitors currently displaying that red versus the set standard of how red should look and it's going to do this across all of these different targets and then the software is going to generate what's called an ICC profile which your computer will load up and it'll use that to display the colors accurately on your screen and obviously it depends on how high quality of a screen you have in terms of how close the calibration software can get those colors and tones versus how they should look so that the higher quality monitor the better it's going to be able to do that but regardless it's still a really important step and then the other thing it's going to do - is it's going to read the brightness levels of your monitor and brightness is really important because most monitors from the factory are set way too high so for example my monitor is calibrated to 120 in terms of luminance and to get there I had to drop my brightness all the way down to 20 from a hundred and 100 to 120 for a luminance reading is kind of what's recommended for printing just to be able to judge what's on your screen the tones and all that and have them come across looking correct when printed on paper so if you've never done that before chances are your monitor brightness is set way too high and that's really gonna affect how your image looks when it's printed on paper so really really important if you haven't calibrated your monitor read up on it a little more by a calibration device it's really a must for a colored calibrated workflow as a photographer so you should definitely do that okay so what we're gonna do next is we're gonna look at two images and the one is the one that I've printed but before that we're going to look at an initial image just to start here because it's a good spot and the first thing we're going to talk about is sizing an image and that's really where you're going to start and that is really determined by the size of the file that you have to begin with so if it's a film scan or if it's from a digital camera you're going to have a certain resolution obviously with the digital camera it's going to depend on the megapixels with a film scan it's going to depend on how large you got that the the negative scanned at and what the resolution is so for example this image right here was shot on a Fuji GA 6 4 5 and it is showing a dimensions of basically 3000 pixels wide by 2200 tall so what we're gonna do is we're gonna open this up in Photoshop so Photoshop is where I do my printing from I edit in Lightroom print from Photoshop it's just the the way that works for me and I'm really happy with it so we'll wait for that to load okay so the original file size that you have is going to determine how big you can print this and still have it looking nice and sharp and detailed I mean obviously you could print this out whatever size you want but if you go too big and the file is not big enough the image it's not going to print well it's going to look soft it's not going to be sharp so if we go up here to image image size and we're going to just zoom this out and we have a bunch of numbers up here and we're going to go through them a really important one is this image size so the total size of this image at the resolution it was scanned at is 40 megabytes and this is a relatively small scan for medium format film this probably would have been a lab scan at their lowest resolution and what this image size is made up of currently is the physical dimensions which this is set to around 12 by 9 inches and then the resolution which is pixels per inch it's set to 240 that's just a default it really doesn't matter what this is that basically if you change any of these you have to change this if you change this you have to change these because your this is what the image is made up of these numbers here and it's kind of a balancing act if you don't want Photoshop to basically create any information that didn't exist hopefully this makes a little more sense as we dive into this but basically let's say I want to print this image at let's say I wanted to go up to 15 inches wide so we're gonna hit 15 and you can see now up here the image size has jump from 55 megabytes from 39 so anytime we're getting an increase in size up here from the original number that means that Photoshop is creating information that didn't exist because to go larger from a physical standpoint and stay at the same resolution Photoshop has to create information because it doesn't have any more than what we started with so since we're going bigger it's creating information so a way to get this number back down or closer to where we started is to start dropping the resolution a pixels per inch so let's say we go to 200 so now we're just underneath this original number of 39.5 so that means that we've increased the physical dimensions of this print and we've done so in a way where Photoshop hasn't created any new information so that's kind of step one and pretty important to understand so my rule of thumb is I never want to go above the original image size number because I don't want Photoshop to create any information that didn't exist already but there are limits to it so the resolution is important pixels per inch and for me my rule of thumb really is for larger prints let's say like maybe 13 by 19 and larger I don't really want to be anywhere below say 220 but probably closer to 240 pixels per inch and for smaller prints obviously you could go as high as you can with staying within these bounds but really around 360 I don't typically go any larger than that because I don't I've never noticed a difference going any higher than that 4 pixels per inch so going back to original numbers if I wanted to print at this 15 inches wide and I had to keep had to adjust my resolution to keep my image size within bounds we were down around 200 so for me I wouldn't print at 200 pixels per inch it's too low and I wouldn't be probably wouldn't be happy with the quality so I just wouldn't print this specific image that's 15 inches wide so if we go back to the original width I think we're at 12 and then we could go let's see if we can get this up to 240 so somewhere around 240 pixels per inch I could print 12 inches wide and that's still from a little bit low so really what happens in a scenario like this is I would just have to go and I would have to get the negative rescanned at a higher resolution because I would rather do that and have a larger scan instead of get Photoshop to basically enlarge this and create information that didn't exist so I hope that makes sense we're gonna look at a another image just to kind of get that point across a little more so this next image this is from a Pentax 672 and you can see that this image was scanned quite a bit larger this is around fifty six hundred pixels wide by 4,500 pixels tall so this probably would have been one of the largest scans that I could have got done at the lab that I use so let's open this one up Photoshop okay so we'll go up to image image size again it's gonna show us our default resolution of 240 so right now our image size is 146 megabytes and at this scan size at 240 pixels per inch it's showing that we could basically print almost 24 inches wide and for that large of a print I would be totally okay printing at 240 pixels per inch because I know just from experience and from tests that that would produce results that I'm happy with and as you got to keep in mind as you start printing larger people are also going to be looking at your work from further away unless they're a photographer so that's something to to keep in mind and that's why you can get away with a little bit lower of a resolution if you're printing larger but let's say we wanted to print this one at 15 inches wide which is what we're gonna do for this demonstration so I'm going to change my physical dimensions to 15 inches wide so right around 12 by 15 now you can see our image size is dropped down to about 60 megabytes from 146 so we we can now know we can bump this resolution number up we might as well like I said from me 360 I usually don't go higher than that because I know from experience that I can't really notice any difference from 360 or above so I'm gonna leave it at 360 and you can see now our total image sizes up to 133 so we're still under this original image size so everything is really good we've resized this we've dropped down the physical dimensions to 12 by 15 up the resolution because we had information left and we know that Photoshop hasn't created anything that didn't exist so we're gonna be good to go so we're gonna click okay and just one quick note for resample I always just leave it set to bicubic I don't want bicubic sharper for reduction I don't want Photoshop doing any sharp like automatic sharpening or anything like that I want to be able to take care of that myself so okay so we have our 15 inch wide image here and the next step that we're gonna do is we're going to sharpen our image really really important when it comes to print sharpening and the one note that I do want to touch on is that when it comes to sharpening you want to make sure that the original file you're working with is already nice and detailed so you don't want to start with a soft image you want to make sure that you've sharpened your image in your editing software so that it looks good - I what you would use for web stuff like that you definitely don't wanna start with a soft image because when it comes to sharpening for print you're kind of taking things a little further than you normally would for web you're gonna sharpen it just a little chunkier crispier than you would for web so it's important to start with a really nice image so we go onto a how-to percent here and this is the area we're gonna focus on these blinds here and nine times out of ten the sharpening method that I use but printing is really straightforward what we're gonna do is we're gonna duplicate our background layer and we're gonna apply a filter to it but what we're gonna do first is we're gonna convert for Smart Filters and what that does once it loads up if you don't convert your layer for Smart Filters when you apply a filter to it and choose the setting of that filter you can't go back in and change that setting if you're unhappy with it so since we're sharpening if you convert for Smart Filters you can open that filter back up and readjust which is handy if you're sharpening and you need to kind of play around with how things look so we ran go filter other and go to high-pass you'll see the whole image goes gray but what's happening here is you can see any high contrast edges there's kind of this radius glow and obviously the higher we jakab radius setting the bigger that gets but for me I almost always land on two or three pixels we're going to start at two I'm going to click OK and then we're gonna change the blend mode of our layer to overlay and now things are gonna look normal again so if you look in the blinds that's on that's off on off and back on again so this is a really nice way to sharpen because what it's doing is it's only targeting high contrast edges so it's not like say an unsharp mask where you're applying this sharpening effect to the entire image and as a result areas that don't have any detail are getting a bunch of essentially noise added to them so if we zoom in right like 300% and we look at the sky that's what our layer on and that's what it and that's what it off on off so almost nothing is happening in the sky at all because there's no high contrast edges it's no detail in the sky that shouldn't be detailing the sky so this is a really really nice way to just increase the sharpening in your image but only apply it to areas that actually have a detail let's just go back in and I know that I'm happy at two here but again with the smart filters we can double click on high-pass now this comes up and now we can adjust and we can see what it looks like real time so obviously we'll go back to - and that's have three but to me that's too much I'm gonna stay at two and like I said before when it comes to sharpening you basically want to take things just a little bit further than you normally would when you're sharpening for screen so for me right now looking at this image it looks a little bit over sharp and not too much but I wouldn't go this far if I was just sharpening for web but I know from tests and for practice when I'm sharpening for print for what I see to translate to the paper it has to be a little bit further than it normally would if this were just for screen so I'm going to leave this as is that's pretty simple sometimes I will add like a smart sharpen layer after this with the radius set really really really low just for fine detail but this image is definitely sharp enough so we're going to roll with this okay so the next thing we're going to do is we're gonna worry about paper size so we set our image size to 15 inches wide we're working with a 12 by 15 and I'm gonna print this on 13 by 19 paper because I want to have a white board or on it which is what I do for all my prints so instead of just saving this file on sending it to a lab and saying you want to print it on 13 by 19 paper or trying to do it yourself for the print setup box there's a good way to avoid any issues that might come up with your image getting resize and that is just going back up to image going to canvas size and setting in this case our canvas size to 19 inches wide by 13 inches tall we want our canvas extension color set to white click OK and there we go so now we basically set up our paper so that means that our whole technically our whole image now is 13 by 19 wide but the actual photograph is still at 12 by 15 so if we now sent this to a lab and printed it on 13 by 19 paper we know that nothing is going to get resized or squeezed or anything like that because the file we're sending is the exact dimensions of the paper that it's going to get printed on and the same with printing at home we know that now when we open with the print dialog box our whole entire image here is set to the paper that we're going to print on so just a nice way to kind of avoid any issues that could pop up in the future okay last thing we're gonna do here is we're gonna go back and talk about color again and this is really the last step of the printing process here and what we want to do is we want to go up to proof set up because we're gonna proof our print now and click custom and this is already on for me so if you're printing at a lab or if you're printing at home you want to get your hands on an ICC profile for the paper you're using and the printer you're using so if you're printing with a lab nine times out of ten if it's a pro lab they're going to have ICC profiles available for download on their website depending on say if you want to print on lustre paper or matte paper or whatever you choose if you're printing at home the paper manufacturer you're using will also have ICC profiles on their website for the paper you're using and the printer that you're using so in this case I am using let's see here Red River Palo Duro soft cloth rag and it's for a canon pro ten so I downloaded the profile and now I can load it up here and I have simulate paper color checked so this is already on so we're gonna hit command Y to turn it off and this will be incredibly hard to see because the simulate paper color there's just such a minor difference so on off on off and what this is doing is it's trying to just give you a representation of how this how your image is going to look when it's printed on a specific paper so I'm going to turn that off that's not really why I use this proofing mainly because the paper I use there isn't much of a shift if you use some fine art papers and matte papers it will show you quite a difference and then you can tweak a little bit if you want but again just all comes down to practice but one of the main reasons I use this is for this gamut warning so basically depending on the ink you're using which comes with your printer and then depending on the paper you're using that specific company is going to be able to produce a certain amount of colors and a certain amount of saturation and anything that falls outside of that realm Photoshop is going to have to push back in for lack of a better term and different papers are gonna be better at handling colors in saturation than others like glossy paper is going to be better than say fine art paper and stuff like that but what happens is if you click gamut warning so nothing happened here because this is a fairly low saturated image but if we drop on a human saturation layer here and let's say we just jack up the saturation so you'll see as we start jacking up saturation we're getting this kind of these gray blobs everywhere and anything that's turning gray is essentially Photoshop telling us that these specific colors are falling outside of the range of the paper and ink combinations ability to reproduce so reproduce these colors so we'll go back to zero so right now without this hue and saturation layer I'm not seeing any gray so basically I know that anything I see in this image is going to be able to be reproduced by the printer and the paper and Photoshop isn't gonna have to do any tweaking if I did have some kind of crazy saturation like this I knew that anything in these ranges mainly the the Reds it's looking like those are gonna fall outside of the papers kind of gamut and Photoshop is gonna have to tweak those to fit them inside of it and Photoshop is pretty good at doing this it's all going to depend on the rendering intent that you're using so relative colorimetric and perceptual are kind of the two common ones and those are just basically those decide the way that Photoshop fits those Edda gamut colors back into the gamut okay so we proofed our image we know that everything's good and that everything is falling inside of our papers gamut I'm going to go through this really quickly if for anyone who does want to print in Photoshop it at this point if you're sending to Aloud you could just save your image as a TIF and send it off you'd be good to go but in this print dialog box the first thing you want to do usually this color handling is going to be set to printer manages colors so you want to change it to Photoshop manages colors really important because then you can load up your printer profile we're gonna go down we're going to pick ours Red River Palo Duro soft cloth rag and then a rendering a tent is set to relative color metric and if you hover over these you'll notice that Photoshop gives you a description of what each one does and how Photoshop fixes out of gamut colors I almost always leave mine set to this relative colorimetric and anytime that I have had colors that have fallen outside of the gamut range I've always been totally happy with whatever Photoshop is done because they've always looked at they should so I just leave that look up to print settings really quickly I already have mine set to 13 by 19 borderless and then we want to go to quality and media and for me I'm just gonna go and I'm gonna pick pro lustre which is the correct one for the paper that I use save it and then I can go and click print and it really is as simple as that once you've setup your image basically you come into this print dialog box and the most important part is just setting up this color handling and loading up your profile so you know that photo shops going to use the right profile for the paper in the ink that you're using so overall this is a pretty straightforward process I try to keep it as brief as possible it just all comes down to having a color manage workflow working within the limits of your original file and then just sizing and sharpening your image properly and I want to mention as well that this is just the way that I work it's a process that I learned years ago that's always produced results that look good to my eyes it's definitely not the only way to work I'm sure there's a hundred other ways you could do this and there's probably better ways you could do this but this is what works for me and I just want to share this for anyone who's looking to learn a little bit more about the printing process or maybe who's looking to try get better results than they've gotten in the past so I hope this helps if you aren't follow me on instagram my link is in the description below check it out that's where I post all my current work and as always thank you guys we'll see you soon [Music]