Print Man Initial with airSlate SignNow

Print man initial

hello there in today's video we're going to discuss is it worth printing your own photos we're going to compare a photo printed on a couple of different printers here against one at the lab we're going to talk about the cost of it all and just really get into printing so we can bring our work to life [Music] before we get into it today this video is sponsored by squarespace if you need a domain name a website or an online store make your next move with squarespace so we're into photography we learn all the skills we go out and we craft the most beautiful image we possibly can we then come home we post process it and then we share that on instagram or online and for so many people that is where the process stops but with 95 million ish images being uploaded to instagram every single day that's over a thousand every second we might want to do something different we want to find a way to maybe elevate our work and get more fulfillment from what we're doing so the best way to do that is to complete the photography process shoot it in the field post-process and then print and there's just something so so special about printing your own work it's just a joyous experience as that piece of paper comes out of the printer with your work on it and you literally see all the effort and struggle come to life into a print like this it's just a fantastic feeling when you've got something physical to hold especially if you do it on the nice paper as well it just feels really really good and there's just no denying it that we are creating art and it's inspirational it inspires me and very often if you produce something really nice it will inspire other people people that are not photographers people who want to buy this work and put it on their wall as just a fantastic piece of artwork and when that happens someone shows that interest in your work it just it's very satisfying and you are sharing your work your story your message to the world and partly i think we create for ourselves but a lot of it we want people to like our work don't we and printing will ensure that you're getting the very best quality and the biggest impact another benefit of printing your work is that it will improve your photography when i first started printing my work it just completely changed my mindset it's that realization that you're not just creating a snapshot you are creating a photograph that's going to be a print that could potentially end up on someone's wall that's particularly the case for landscape photographers and fine art photographers and if we think about it like that it benefits us because it slows us down it helps us to be more mindful about what we're including in the frame and what we want to exclude from it as well so we come up with something that really tells the story we're trying to portray that invokes a feeling and becomes something much more intentional and inspirational to others so with all that good stuff in mind where do we even start how do you even begin to think about printing your work now we're gonna get into that but there's a good chance you may have an a4 printer at home and they're all pretty good these days at printing photos so it may just be the case that you buy some a4 photo paper stick it in that printer and you could be good to go but if you do that you will very quickly like me realize that when it comes to print size matters and i personally think bigger is better so once we've decided they're actually going to print our images we then have two choices we can either buy a printer and start doing it ourselves at home or we can upload them onto the internet and send them off to a lab they print it and send it back to us now we are going to discuss the pros and cons the costs and we're going to do a nice little comparison of a couple of different printers and a lab photograph so you can make an informed choice and decide what is best for you but regardless of the method we're going to use the there's a couple of little things we need to do before we print our images because when we print our images we are losing the backlight of the computer and what we see for a printed image is reflected light off the surface so we need to make a couple of little adjustments now you may hear a lot of the time about a calibrated monitor that's not really something i am that concerned with yes it will help yes if you go that far it's something worth considering but there's a little trick that we can do a little work around to make sure we don't really need that but one thing that is important is icc profiles now these are little bits of software that we use with lightroom or whatever photo editor you're using because we want to be able to match the paper to the printer that we're using now if you've got your own printer you can go onto the paper manufacturer's website and download them from there companies like photospeed will do custom icc profiles for you as well if you send them some stuff but i use canson infinity paper and just going on their website select my printer download that and i'm away you then install that icc profile into lightroom as we'll see in a minute and with we've then got paper and printer matched if you're doing it at a lab they will have their printers obviously you then just download the icc profile from their website for the particular paper you want and then we can use that so what that does then in lightroom lightroom will then mimic the look on the screen to match how the paper and the printer will look to give us the best idea and the best chance to match what we see on the screen with what the final print will be like so let's get into lightroom and we'll take a look at how to prepare your file for print you can do this with other photo editors it doesn't really matter i'm just using lightroom so we're into lightroom and this is the image we are going to look at this was the one i created the other week when i was out and about doing long exposures is one of my favorite photos i've taken for quite some time and i think it's gonna print really quite beautifully so the first thing we want to do is go into the develop module and we want to come down to the bottom here where it says soft briefing now soft proofing is just the the phrase for where the computer will try and mimic what's going on from the printer and the ink and then we come up to here and we can see the profiles so these are our icc profiles once we've installed them on our computer this is where they will appear you can click other to select the ones you want then click ok and it will show up in this little list here so for this one i'm going to print it on that new printer that you saw the canon pro 1000 and for this case i'm going to use a burrito that is a semi-gloss really nice it shows the colors really really nicely and works really well once we've selected the correct icc profile we then want to click create proof copy and that will create a specific print file it essentially creates a virtual copy but then we can make the little adjustments that we need to do to compensate for the loss of that backlight so as a rule of thumb almost always i will increase the exposure by a third of a stop this is true even if you have a calibrated monitor which i do normally edit on it gives me the full adobe rgb range as well and that's the exposure up by a third of a stop with this image as well i think there's quite a lot of black areas in the shadows so i'm also just going to up the shadows a little bit to about 30. now with the burrito paper it gives you really good contrast it gives you really good detail right across the scene but if we come down to the rag paper you can see how much of a difference that makes and it sort of essentially brightens up the image because the the rag photo matte paper isn't gonna hold as much color so you can just sort of see the little difference that that makes and it's just gonna be down to personal choice whether you like your images on glossy semi-gloss or matte paper so if we're going to print it and send it to the lab all we want to then do is go to export open the export window and we want to export it as a tiff so i'm going to go full size and then just come down to here and go to tiff the prints place that you send it to the lab will tell you what color space to use most of the time they will ask for adobe rgb in 16 bit as well i'll leave the resolution at 300 and then if you want to resize it you can but i'm not going to do that now because i'm going to print it myself we're pretty much there ready to print so you could go to the print tab up here but what i love about the canon printers is they come with a plug-in that just makes printing really really easy but when we do the final print we want the image on the screen to match as closely as possible the final print a calibrated monitor will help but a really good tip is just to print one that's much much smaller if you're using a lab this is going to take a little bit longer but get a 4x6 made or an a4 like i'm going to make you can then print it out check that the color is looking right if it's got a little bit more magenta in it just shift the tint slider down towards the green and over time with a little bit of practice you will get very close or very expert shall we say with your computer with your monitor then with some monitors it's not even possible to do the calibration anyway if you're using a laptop it might not be possible if you're using a tablet like an ipad you're not going to be able to calibrate it so printing off something smaller and cheaper is going to be the way forward but let's now go to file and then plug in extras and it's the canon print studio pro plugin which just makes this so so easy that loads up and then we just go through the settings this canon pro 1000 will let you print borderless which is really nice it maximizes the use of the paper but in this case i'm going to change the layout to get a border just makes the print easier to handle i also get the original aspect ratio of the photo in the final image so go to print settings a2 yes top feed that's fine highest quality clear coat the entire page that's where it's going to apply that chroma optimizer to give it that longevity i'm on the burrito paper there i'm all ready and now i can just go ahead and click print the printer as you can see is all set up behind me and then just click print and away we go it's always a little bit nerve-wracking though as you click print or click buy if you're on online uh nervous but exciting [Music] right there we go it's printed and it's always just so exciting when you look at an image for the first time when it comes out of the printer you lift up this beautiful paper and i'm just so so happy with that i think it looks absolutely beautiful and it's that fantastic a2 size you saw at the beginning that i've upgraded to this printer which produces these really nice a2 prints and it's actually really quite a big size especially by the time you get it mounted and in a frame it's just really actually rather large now let's talk about printers just for a minute like i said i've upgraded to this canon image program pro 1000 it's quite a mouthful but it's a fantastic printer it has 12 inks one of which is a chroma optimizer which is uh like a see-through sheen that it puts onto the paper a to produce more longevity in the prints and also it gives some of the colors a little bit of an extra punch that only works with glossy and semi-gloss if we're using matte papers that's not gonna printer will not put that down but it's the really nice inks that this printer has and it's of the same sort of pro range as the 40 and 60 inch wide printers so it's about as good a quality as you can get from these canon inkjet printers i've upgraded though from the canon pro 10s i've used that for quite a few years now and that's still a fantastic printer that has ten inks one of which is still the chroma optimizer it's produced work that i've sold i've always been really happy with it but the only sort of difference is that that's a3 plus now a3 plus is it ranges somewhere bigger than a3 but smaller than a2 and it's actually still a really nice size once you print that and frame it and it looks great on your wall in your living room those prints of that size so that's still a great printer canon have recently released the image program pro 300 i think it is which is essentially a version like this printer but a3 plus size it's also quite a bit smaller than the pro 10s so it will fit more nicely on your desk but these printers are fantastic we'll talk a bit more about cost in a little while when we weigh up the pros and cons of whether we should be owning one of these but i wanted since i've got both of these printers at the moment i haven't sold on the pro 10 ses i thought i would do a comparison and print this image again this time on map paper with this printer the pro 1000 the pro 10s and i have sent away for the same print to be printed at the lab now i've always used the print space i used it for that big print behind me as you may have seen on that previous video they are great that you can upload your images and like we talked about and they sent back great work so i got the same print uh using the same file on the paper as similar as possible it's not the same paper because they don't do the canton paper but it's the hannah mule rag photo paper so i think while we've got those it'll be really nice to compare all three to see the difference between the top end canon a mid-range canon and then what you're going to get at a lab if you don't want to buy and print your own work at home so let's head over to the back and we'll have a look at all three images right so here we have the three prints we've got the canon pro 1000 the canon pro 10 s and then the one that i've had made at the print space now when you are viewing your prints you want to be doing it ideally under daylight but we have the benefit of this video light which is essentially mimicking daylight but looking at the one from the pro 1000 this is the new printer it just looks beautiful it's this beautiful canson rag photographic paper as well which is just so smooth and makes images like this just look really artistic fine art look to it it's got great longevity great looking blacks and the print quality is just what you would expect from that printer really just looks absolutely fantastic you can get it nice and close there's loads of detail there the print is pretty much perfect i can't really imagine it being any better now moving on to the pro 10s this again it has 10 inks as opposed to 12 there it still looks absolutely fantastic and to be honest having studied these a little bit closely pixel peeping probably more than you should do i am struggling particularly with this image anyway i'm struggling to tell the difference between the two the quality and the print it looks virtually identical so for print quality that protein 10s is still absolutely fantastic one thing i did that was a little bit of a mistake is when i uploaded the image and ordered the print from the print space i forgot to tell them that i'd already adjusted the brightness so normally if you just send them an image they'll adjust the brightness a little bit to compensate for the stuff we've been talking about but i forgot to tell them i'd already done that so this is a little bit brighter that hasn't diminished the image at all it's just not quite where i wanted it the paper is the hana mule rag paper it's also slightly different it's got a little bit of an etching in it it's not quite as smooth as the canson that can be really what you want in a lot of situations if you want to introduce a bit of texture to the paper if you've got a very textured image that works really well but it still looks great and it's actually the paper is a little bit whiter than the canson as well so it's quite an interesting paper so it is a little bit brighter the colors are a little bit more saturated on these two because as you increase luminosity or brightness then saturation reduces so that has happened here but like i say it doesn't diminish the image and the print quality is still exceptional if i hadn't forgotten to say that i'd already corrected for brightness i think these would have looked almost identical apart from that paper difference but if you were to send away for this without buying your own printer and just using the print space you are going to be able to sell these images no problem whatsoever the quality is perfect and i just think it's quite interesting that across all three a range of prices that we'll talk about now quality isn't really the issue here we've got great quality across that entire range as you know this video is sponsored by squarespace in my opinion squarespace is undoubtedly the best place to make your website it does everything for you you can register a domain name build your website with very little technical knowledge if any at all and you can get a website up and running within a few minutes you can then upload all your pictures present your work in the most beautiful way and then it's just incredibly easy to set up an online store as well so if you have any ambition of selling prints then squarespace will make that really easy for you so go to squarespace.com to start your food trial today and then if you set it up you like what you've done you can use the offer code first man to get 10 off your first purchase okay let's talk about the pros and cons of owning your own printer we'll start with the pros and definitely one of the best things that i find is being able to control the whole process right from pixel to print being able to just tweak all the way through to get the best image i possibly can that's really important to me and it's also extremely satisfying it's also really nice just be able to create prints whenever you want and give them away as gifts and obviously to be able to sell them and to have control of how that final image looks is all really important but they're the con the big con apart from the fact that printing can be difficult and these big photo printers are really not very good at being normal printers it does print documents and stuff but not very well it looks fine but it's just faffy with the computer but the big one by some distance is the cost having your own printer buying your own photo printer like this just makes almost no financial sense whatsoever for 99 of people i sell some images some landscape photographs but in no way do i sell enough to even break even the canon pro 1000 for example funnily enough costs about a thousand pounds you've then got to spend money on the ink it does come with starter inks which have printed most of the stuff i've shown you today but then to replace all of the inks it's about 350 pounds the canon pro 10 s you can buy that now for around 350 400 and the inks cost about 100 pounds to buy a full set of things each one costs 10 pounds for the pro 1000 each one costs about 40 pounds you get more liquid in the pro 1000 and over time the cost of the pro 1 000 inc will be cheaper but these canon printers do as well clean the nozzles by forcing ink out so you're essentially wasting ink to ensure that you get clean nozzles and therefore clean prints so that's an added cost as well it's something that a lot of people have quite a big issue with i think the epson printers are a little bit better you then have that pro 300 that we talked about i think that's currently around five to six hundred pounds i'm not sure of the ink cost for that but you then on top of that have the paper cost so the canson papers i use either they vary in price often on amazon but i'm usually looking somewhere around the kind of 90 pounds to 150 pounds for a3 plus or a2 paper you get 25 sheets in a pack so you can imagine how much each of those individual pieces of paper costs you then have the ink that goes on top of that usually about i don't know one pound fifty two pounds maybe per print but it still gets expensive if you then sell your images we then have the postage and packaging costs you want to make it look as nice as possible as well so the costs do just keep mounting so if you're selling your images for what 200 pounds maybe maybe a little bit more maybe a little bit less you're going to have to sell quite a few before you even break even especially with the pro 1 000 pound plus printer and then the ink costs are there so it's it doesn't make much sense financially unless you sell in a lot of prints and for a good price as well but that being said a lot of the very best things in life make no sense whatsoever having children is a good example it can be frustrating and annoying and expensive 90 of the time but it's that magical 10 that makes the difference that makes it all worthwhile and printing is pretty much the same but there's just something beautiful and intangible about owning your own printer and creating your own work for me i like having that control from the pixel to the print and it's just so satisfying but i also it's just it works as a cathartic experience and if i'm ever feeling a bit stressed or anxious if i do a little bit of printing that all just melts away then holding the completed working hand you are reminded of the moment how it felt to be there the journey you went through the struggle you went through and it's just a very fulfilling end to the photography process and it then serves as a reminder a reminder of why we love photography that encourages us to get out the door and do it all [Music] again