Photo Book Photo Printing

Are you curious about the printing process? Would you like to know the best way to get your photos off screen and onto paper? We have passed some of your key printing questions to the professional print technicians at Print Lab. They break down everything from myths about CMYK and monitoring calibration to explaining how images can be optimized for the printing process.

  

Screen against paper

One of the biggest obstacles to printing is getting your prints to appear on your computer monitor. The most important thing to keep in mind when preparing a picture for printing is that your computer screen is backlit, and the paper is not. Pictures always appear darker when printed than they appear on your computer.    

You can solve this problem in two ways.

First, try to make your computer monitor look more like a printout. While monitor calibration is a term that is most commonly used, it doesn't help much in seeing what your prints look like unless you're using a dedicated print monitor. Instead of worrying about expensive monitors and calibration equipment, just turn down the brightness (and back lighting if possible) on your monitor. Then also reduce the overall contrast of your monitor. While this is not a perfect representation of what to expect from printing, it does give you a much more accurate approximation. The second solution is to lighten the image to compensate for the transfer to paper. Print lab recommends using curve fit layers or Adobe Camera RAW (with a Smart Object workflow) for the most precise control possible.Check out our PRO tutorial to learn how to harness the power of curves. How To Master Adjustment Layers In Photoshop! If you prefer Adobe Camera RAW, check out How to Master Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop.  

CMYK

Don't convert your images to CMYK before printing! Compared to Adobe RGB 1998, CMYK is a smaller color space for optimal printing or even optimal RGB for the web. While you may have heard that CMYK should be the reference color space for printing, it is no longer the case. By converting to CMYK, you risk printing your image with far less color detail.       

  

Image resolution, DPI and print size

The most important factor in determining the print size and DPI is where and how the image will look. If you want your prints to be viewed up close, 150-300 DPI ensures that all of these small details are visible. When viewed from a distance of several feet or more, a DPI of 100 is perfectly acceptable in most cases.    

If you ever need to make a larger print, Print lab recommends lowering the DPI instead of using higher sampling methods. Up Sampling is based on the program that you use to analyze an image and add more pixels, which can produce unexpected or undesirable results. Usually a lower DPI results in a slightly softer image. However, this may not be noticeable when viewing the print from several meters away (which is often the case with large prints).    

Preview photos for direct printing.

If your printer can print directly from memory cards, you can limit the preview of photos by printing an index sheet or by viewing images on a built-in preview screen. However, if you have both options, keep in mind that each has its advantages and you will want to use one or the other anytime. Using the preview screen is faster because you don't have to print twice. Once for the index sheet and once for the final print - and it costs less because you don't have to pay for ink or paper to print the index sheet. However, if you have taken several similar photos with slight variations in the settings, this is, for example, a trick that professional photographers use to increase the likelihood that one of the photos has the correct settings to make the picture look better, an index sheet is the preferred one Approach to deciding which version to print in full size. The printed thumbnails give you a better idea than the preview image of how the colors will print in the final photo and how well the details will show based on relatively small differences in shading.       

Don't fix the photos until you see what they really look like.

Note that the colors and shades you see on the screen (whether it's your computer screen or the printer's preview screen) almost never exactly match, and often don't even come close to, the printed version. (This is for all sorts of reasons that are beyond the scope of this article.) For photos that interest you in a way that you want to get the best possible photo with a minimum of labor, it's generally a good idea to cut out the photo you want first, which Print out the photo, then make any manual adjustments you want, depending on what the printed version looks like.If the printer or program you are printing from has an auto-correction option, you can try printing the photo with and without the correction feature before making any manual changes.

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