Last week I completed work on a new mini-portfolio of images from the Iceland interior. I put them up on the website and have been living with them for the past week or so.

Over the week that i’ve been living with them, I’ve noticed things in the images that I didn’t see at first, so I decided to go and print them out. Well, I really should practice more of what I preach ! as I found quite a few problems with the images that weren’t quite evident on screen.

To name a few issues that I never notice on screen, but always become apparent in the print:

1. dust spots, or distractions in the image, such as some sudden tonality change either right in the middle of the composition or at the very edge.

2. Colour casts. In the instance of the images you see here, I noticed patches of deep blue that weren’t evident on the monitor. What I always find fascinating about noticing colour casts in the actual prints, is that once I see them there - I now see them on the monitor.

3. Overall composition errors. The image may feel balanced on the monitor, but once printed out, certain objects or tones within the frame of the image become more prominent. Perhaps an area of the picture has too much detail than I would like, and therefore need their contrast reduced. Or perhaps it’s the other way around - areas of the frame that I thought were prominent in the image on screen, seem to lack it once printed. I have found that sometimes things that require presence in the edit - can be pushed much much further in the edit. And printing seems to tell me that I have only reached 50% of where it should be, and there is still a further 50% more to go in pushing the contrasts etc.

The main take away from this is":

“if an image looks good in print: it will look good on the monitor. But not the other way around”

If you don’t print, you only reach 90% of final intention of the image.

Photoshop Actions

I use actions all the time. They allow me to reduce ‘screwing up’ more than tends to happen when printing. There is already much to do to prepare an image for print and the Epson print driver is a nightmare (luckily, I do not use it - I have a much simpler piece of software that allows me to simply drag the file to the printer for printing).

But here are my actions for printing. I have these set up as constant actions for any images I work on.

You may notice that I have three actions at the top for saving PSD, Save for Web, Open Shadows etc. These are a feature of my editing workflow: I like to audition edited images as jpegs for my website. I also like to have a simple way of saving PSD files into one area.

As I edit, I audition the jpegs together in Lightroom’s gallery. I can see how the portfolio fits together.

As to preparing images for print, I LOVE the PixelGenius sharpener toolkit. Despite what they claim themselves that their sharpener algorithms in Lightroom are just as good, I do not believe they are. And so far I’ve managed to keep the sharpeners in operation up to the latest macOS OS.

Capture Sharpener reintroduces the loss of detail that is inherent in all capture mediums. In digital cameras the anti-aliasing filter introduces softness to the file. Use Capture Sharpener to recover lost detail. In my case, it is my film scanner that introduces loss of detail and I have an algorithm here that works great on Positive 6x6 film scans.

Printing Masterclass, from colour management to final print with Photoshop £34.99

Then I resize down to the intended final output size. My printer’s resolution is 1440 dots per inch. I use 360ppi (this is a clean division of 1440 dpi). The theory being you are trying to map a clean division of pixels in the file to dots on the printer. Therefore using a printing resolution of 360 dpi allows for 4 pixels to be quantised down to 1 dot (1440 / 4 = 360).

Once resized, I then sharpen for inkjet output. This is where most folks go wrong with printing manually. They tend to apply sharpener onto the file so that it looks good on the monitor. They are in essence ‘sharpening for monitor’. When sending files to the printer, they tend to get softened down a bit (a little like the anti-aliasing problem at capture). So applying output sharpener applies a degree of sharpener to compensate for the softening down the printer will introduce. Note: when applying output sharpness, it always looks too much on screen, but that is because it is applying the correct amount for print, not for the screen!

Then covert to the colourspace, and 8-bit mode.

I use Photoshop actions all the time, and I have been using this kind of format for so many years now. If I keep the same process, then editing, and re-printing become more perfunctory than something that I have to give a lot of thought to.