Captain Blammo wrote:
I’ve been messing around with photoshop for long enough, but haven’t done anything much with printing. What kind of issues and procedures am I looking at to get an optimal print?
Hi again Cap’n,
You can do very well if you spend an hour or so setting up your printer to match your screen reasonably closely. Start by reading Ian Lyon’s web page for your particular version of Photoshop, and setting up your system accordingly. Here’s Ian’s link for CS:
http://www.computer-darkroom.com/ps8-colour/ps8_1.htm I am going to look into colour profiling, as it seems to be a must. Does anything else spring readily to mind?
Yes – my advice is to start by not going into color profiling, if by that you mean buying equipment to generate your own screen and printer profiles.
I realize fully that there are others in this group who disagree profoundly with this, and I concede that profiling equipment is appropriate and necessary for professional work. This is particularly true if you send materials out to be printed, or receive prepared work from others, most of the profiling instruments and software are overkill for a single monitor, scanner, and printer setup. It’s also true that people with adequate money, and the desire for additional accuracy, also have a valid reason to purchase profiling equipment. If you go that route, keep in mind that whatever you buy, there will always be additional equipment and software that costs more, and promises even more accurate results, and even with a lab full of equipment, there is an effect called viewer metamerism – no two pairs of eyes are precisely the same.
So, at this time, I recommend carefully calibrating your monitor using Adobe Gamma, then configuring your printer either with the canned profiles shipped with the printer, or other profiles you may download free from the net. The Ian Lyons page has some satisfactory profiles for several Epson printers.
You may also decide to try a variety of driver settings in your printer’s configuration settings. Whether you use the manufacturer’s canned profiles downloaded profiles, or modify the device driver settings, it is good to evaluate your results using a test strip. You can make one yourself in Photoshop by posterizing a gradient, or use the one from Curvemeister, which includes a variety of flesh tones. Make sure you can distinguish all the squares, and that the black and white squares are as dark as possible, and that there is no systematic color cast to the test strip.
The url for the test strip is here:
http://www.curvemeister.com/downloads/TestStrip/digital_test _strip.htm Having said this, if you have more money than sense, a great desire for perfection and an infatuation with equipment over results, or if you simply want to experiment, you can purchase a colorimeter for $100 or so that will do a good job of calibrating your monitor. Additional, more expensive, devices are available to calibrate your printer.
Currently, if I want to print an image, I use the scaling option in the "Print with preview" dialog to fit it on the page. Is this a reasonable habit? I am assuming that the printer will print as much detail as it is capable of if I do this. Is there a better way to go about things?
I use it all the time – fit to image to page.
Also, I have heard some people talk about upsampling their images before printing. Is this a good idea, and how far should one upsample images for a given image/printer resolution combination?
In general it is good to do the upsampling yourself in Photoshop, and sharpen the image manually for best results. No one can give you a universal answer to how do do this, and there are even some who believe that sharpening is the invention of the devil. My suggestion is to resize in Photoshop to 320 pixels per inch, and then start with Unsharp Mask, radius
1.6, 60%. For even better results, convert to Lab, and sharpen only the
Lightness channel. I generally do this for my 13×19 prints, and don’t bother for 8×10’s.
Thanks for any help and pointers
You’re very welcome – I hope I’ve helped you get good results. —
Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net
