Category: Group Meeting

From Screen to Wall: How to Print Photos the Right Way

This Teton Photo Club meeting dove into what really happens after you click the shutter. Kathy and Michael walked us through the full printing journey, from pixels and monitor brightness to paper choice, sharpening mistakes, and working with labs.

Along the way, we covered real-world pitfalls, practical workflows, and hard-earned tips that turn good images on a screen into prints you’re proud to hang on the wall.

All right. Uh, welcome everyone. We’ll get started. So, tonight kicks off one of our presentations about a topic, and then next month we’ll have more of a hands-on. And the topic will be printing.

Also, you may have all seen that the Yellowstone trip for 2026 is already up for grabs. It sounds like there’s a full crew already, but you never know. If you’re still interested, you can always raise your hand, I guess.

But anyhow, tonight it’s going to be Kathy and Michael talking about printing. And again, I think it’s one of my favorite topics because, you know, if you don’t ever print anything, maybe we’ll get to a time where we have nothing but really high-quality monitors all over our walls and they’ll just constantly change pictures for us. But I still just love the beauty of a print hanging on the wall. And until you really put one up there, I don’t think you’ve actually finished the job.

So, I’m going to turn it over to Kathy and Michael and let us get started. But also, if any of you are interested in coming to the June meeting, send an email to me. It was in the last newsletter in the reminders. Just let me know you’re coming because we are going to provide lunch.

And first, well, we have a little lottery, so we can only have time to print about 15 photos that day. It’s almost full already. We’ve got about 10 or 12 participants, but if you’re interested in getting a photograph paid for by the club, now is your chance.

We’ll be at Kathy’s house. She’s kind enough to let us hang there and use her printing system, and maybe we’ll learn something. Also, we’ll hopefully have eagles come up and provide a little in-yard entertainment for us, if you all have seen her Facebook post lately.

So anyhow, I’ll turn it over to Kathy and Michael.

Right. Hey everybody. Good to see everyone here. So, as David said, you know, we all take a lot of pictures and we look at them on our phones and our screens and whatever, but I honestly think that until you’ve actually seen your prints on paper, you don’t really know what these images look like and how good they are. Because no matter how good it looks on your screen, it just looks so much better printed. Then put a frame around it and it really starts to become a beautiful piece of art.

And so what we’re going to talk about tonight is everything you need to know about making your images look fantastic. Kathy is a wonderful printer. I use her, and I use other labs. So between the two of us, we’re going to talk about all different ways to prepare your prints, all the things you need to take a look at.

There’s a lot of information here, and some of this stuff gets a little, I won’t say complicated, but it gets a little tricky. So I want everyone to feel free to leave their mics open, and if anything comes up that you want clarification on or want to ask a question about, just jump right in and we’ll answer it.

We’re going to go through a whole bunch of stuff, but there are three things that I want you to keep in mind during the course of this presentation. The three critical areas are sharpening, monitor brightness on your computer, and the relationship between pixels and prints. We’re going to talk about all those things and other things. But as these things come up, really think about how it works into your own workflow, because those three things are critical to making your prints perfect.

So without any further ado, Kathy, take us going.

Yeah. So we’re going to talk about these things. Image resolution versus viewing distance, the difference between something you can walk right up to and a billboard on the freeway, and common problems that I see because I’ve been printing now since, I don’t know, 2000 maybe.

Workflow, there’s various numbers. My saying is always, “Workflow: have one.” Whatever it is, monitor calibration, sharpening, printer RIPs, which is something that is very near and dear to my heart, and Michael’s going to talk about working with a print lab.

Next slide.

So, a pet peeve of mine: DPI versus PPI. PPI is pixels per inch, and that’s the resolution of your image. DPI is dots per inch, and that’s the output of a printer. So you’re going to give me an image at 300 pixels per inch, and I’m going to print it at 2880 dots per inch. And I’ve had some pretty professional photographers tell me that they’re the same thing, and they really aren’t. Although a lot of software uses them incorrectly, that’s the difference between the two.

The smaller the image, the more resolution it needs because you’re going to walk right up to it and you’re going to want to see all the detail. Whereas a billboard is going to have, you know, like three pixels per inch because your eye doesn’t notice it’s that low because it’s so far away, and you fill in the difference.

So we recommend 300 pixels per inch always, unless you’re going big. And then there are a whole lot of different games you can play if you’re making, like, a four-foot by seven-foot print or a billboard to make it so that it still works with your image. There’s a little guide here that I got out of some things. So, like, if your viewing distance is 6 inches, you don’t really need a resolution of 1145. You still use 300, but the further the viewing distance, the fewer pixels you need.

One of the reasons why your prints look so much better than they look on the screen is because when you print out at almost 3,000 dots per inch, it’s so much denser and higher resolution than when you’re looking at your screen, which is 72 dots per inch. When you’re looking at a picture on your screen, you can’t even see the resolution that your image file actually has. And when you print it, all of a sudden it just really comes to life.

So let’s look a little bit at how your sensor on your camera, on your digital camera, relates to printing. We now have digital sensors. I mean, if you have a Fuji GFX medium format, you’ve got 100 megapixels. But a couple of years ago, we were shooting 8, 10, 12 megapixels, and then we started getting these 24-megapixel cameras.

So let’s just use as an example a 24-megapixel camera. Most DSLRs and mirrorless shoot in a 2×3 ratio. So a 2×3 ratio for 24 megapixels, which is 24 million pixels, that’s what a megapixel means. Mega, million pixels. That’s 6,000 pixels on the long side and 4,000 pixels on the short side.

So why do we need to know that? If you have an aspect ratio of 3:2 and you create a file with a 24-megapixel camera that you want to print at 300 pixels per inch, this is where things start to get tricky.

If you need 300 pixels in every inch of your print, then you would take 6,000, which is the number of pixels on the long side of your image file, divided by 300, which is how many pixels you need per inch. And that tells you that you can make a print that’s 20 inches on the long side. To get perfect resolution using all of the data in the sensor, you can print up to 20 inches.

Now, you can actually print even a little bit bigger because software, and there are various kinds of software that will do it, Photoshop will do it, Lightroom will do it. Some of you may have used Topaz Gigapixel. That’ll do it. The computer can actually determine what goes in between some of those pixels as you start to stretch them out.

So 20 inches is not your maximum print size. It’s only your maximum print size if you don’t do any what we call interpolation. And by the way, that’s before you crop your picture. When you crop your picture, you’re reducing the number of pixels in the picture, so you have to recalculate. And we’re going to go through an example of what that looks like in a few minutes.

So think about when you have a 24-megapixel image that’ll go to 20 inches. If you now buy a Sony a7R III, which is a 60-megapixel camera, that’s going to give you a larger opportunity to print without interpolation. Does that make sense?

So now let’s move to some of the common problems that we’ll show you in demonstration in a little bit that hurt your prints. We talked about, at the very beginning, one of the most important things is sharpening. And because you are printing at almost 3,000 dots per inch, when you look at your image file on the screen at 72 dots per inch, it doesn’t look as sharp as it actually is. In fact, most image files don’t need any sharpening at all.

I almost never sharpen. Almost never.

Yeah. Because if you take a print and you hold it up to the image on the screen, you will see how much sharper the print is. So one of the things that people tend to do is use that sharpening slider because it makes them look better on the screen, but it actually makes it look worse on the print. And I’ll show you an example of that in a bit.

The next thing that people do, and this is because your monitor isn’t properly calibrated, is white things that aren’t white. When you look at your screen, your bright, beautiful, backlit, gorgeous, colorful screen, everything looks great. But your paper on your print is front-lit and it doesn’t have the same level of brightness as your screen. And if your monitor is too bright, when you go to print things, they’re going to look too dark.

So one of the things that we recommend is changing the brightness of your screens. Especially if you have an Apple Mac, iMac, or Apple Cinema Display. They tend to be some of the brightest monitors out there. And you can do color calibration, you can do brightness calibration. And the brightness calibration, in my experience, is almost more important than the color calibration because, although many monitors come out of the box and they’re too cool, you can almost see that with your eye, and simple color calibration will fix that. But it won’t always fix brightness calibration.

And then finally, the clue. Oh, go ahead, Kath.

I was just gonna say, also a lot of people, when you’re shooting, especially scenes in the snow, use the auto white meter in their camera instead of overexposing for the snow. So the histogram, we’ll talk about it in a few minutes, but you can see it also in the histogram, that the image is actually darker than it should be. And when your monitor is too bright, you’re seeing it how it should be, but not how it is.

Yeah, the histogram is always your final answer. You know, if you have clipping in your histogram on the dark side or on the light side, that’s going to show up in your print. And if you have things in your image file that are white and your histogram doesn’t go all the way over to the right, you know just from looking at the histogram that you’re not going to get whites. So always look at your histogram before you print.

Sensor dust. I shoot a Nikon D850 and I have about 30 pieces of sensor dust that I have to clone out every time I go to make a print. Drives me crazy. But I have to do it. I have to clean my sensor every couple of months.

And then lastly, chromatic aberration artifacts. Sometimes if you do too much processing, you’ll see some greens or some magentas and other little goobers in your print, and those need to be corrected before you can go to print.

So we were talking about brightness. You know, the brain is a brilliant organ. And when you look at this image, your brain is seeing that snow as white because you know that that snow is white. But if you were to hold up a white piece of paper up to your screen right now, you would see that that snow is not white. That snow is gray.

And you can see, can you guys see my little dot here?

Yes.

So here’s the histogram. And you see that the right side of the histogram stops far short of pure white, which is because this snow here is not white. But if you were to make an adjustment in your file so that the snow is white, this is moved over a little bit further. This could actually even be whiter. But even though that looks white to your brain, it won’t look white on your print.

This is, I would say, 90% of the image problems I see when I get images from people, is this thing right here. Because when you look at it on a nice bright monitor, it looks nice and white. But if your monitor is correctly brightness calibrated, it’ll look gray like it does on mine, and that ends up looking white.

So the best way to make sure that you follow every step properly is to create a workflow. And there are workflows for all different kinds of processing. I’m sure you have your own personal workflow as to how you edit images, but there’s also a workflow for print preparation.

So from your camera to your computer to the final output, it’s the process that you use. It’s all those steps that you take and that you repeat so that you are consistently creating the proper image file to go to print. And if you follow the same steps every single time, you will get consistent quality every single time. It’ll allow you to get a well-prepared image.

Also, an image that you can find if you want to print it a second time, because that’s something that we all go through. Where did I put that negative file? I don’t know where it is because I didn’t either keyword it, or I didn’t put it in the right folder, I didn’t give it the right name, and ultimately it will get you a beautiful print.

We’re going to show you a couple of different workflows, a Photoshop workflow and other types of software, and also one for Lightroom Classic. They are different, and depending upon how you do your own processing, you can adapt one or the other of these workflows.

So the first thing, first, that is common to every workflow is once you take a photograph, download it to your computer, put it on your drive, verify that the picture file is there and that it looks okay, it’s not corrupted, and then do a backup immediately.

I’m kind of a backup freak. I have cloud backup and I have two hard drive backups on my desktop. I’ve lost hard drives, and in two clicks, all my information is back. Backing up is really critical, and I really recommend that in addition to a hard drive backup, that everyone does cloud backup.

The cloud backup I use is Backblaze. There’s also Carbonite. There may be a couple of others, but I’ve had great success with Backblaze. And I think it’s, Kathy, what is it, 75 bucks a year now or something?

Yeah. And you guys, it’s unlimited. I have all of my images, all of my clients’ images, backed up on a hard drive in my safe that I do periodically. It’s there, and I have like five terabytes of data there now, and it costs me less than $100 a year.

So yeah.

And then when you put your card back in your camera, reformat it. Some people I know delete images off their card on their computer. That’s not the best practice. The best practice is to reformat it in your camera.

Yeah. Because if you, just for a second, if you delete them individually, you end up losing space on your memory card. I don’t know, it doesn’t completely erase that your image was there in a way that eventually really bites you. And then once you’ve done that, then we get into workflow.

Yeah. And like I always say, “Workflow: have one.” One that you understand, that you can use every time, and that you understand where your images are.

This is what I do. I learned this from a guy a long time ago. So I basically have a folder for a shoot, and it’s dated. And then in that I have whatever comes right out of my camera or my phone or whatever in RAW. It may be a RAW file, it may not, depending on where I get it from, but I call it RAW. And then I use a series of folders.

So if I have a Photoshop file with layers, it’s in “Masters.” If I flattened and sharpened it to print it and got it ready, it’s in “Print Ready.” And I have a really similar workflow for each of my clients. Where, you know, they send me an image, it’s in “Originals,” which is my version of RAW for my client.

So basically, I never change the name of the file. It’s always image 5792 because if I change it to Bob’s Red Barn, I’m never going to remember five years from now that it’s Bob’s Red Barn. So it might as well be a random number.

So this is what I do, and I’ve been doing this for a really long time. Because I do use Lightroom, but I don’t use the one with the catalog. So I don’t have a catalog. I’m very rudimentary, very regimented, and I put it in the same place every time so I know which one’s edited, which one was the RAW file, that sort of thing. So that’s me.

So in Lightroom, which is what I use, where we do have a catalog, once you’ve imported your images into your folder hierarchy, whatever. Some people do it by date, some people do it by location. There’s a whole sort of art and science aspect to how we all each use our Lightroom catalogs. But whatever works for you, if you use Lightroom, you should stick with it.

The only thing I really preach a lot is to do appropriate keywording because if you take just a couple of minutes to keyword your files accurately, it makes it so much easier to find them later.

And then whether you’re using Lightroom Classic or Photoshop or Capture One, you name it, you’ll go through and do your image editing. And what you do want to do is adjust exposure, tone, contrast, local adjustments, cropping, tone curves, levels, layers, cloning. Do all that stuff. Just don’t sharpen yet. Prepare your files so they’re ready, but don’t sharpen. We’re not going to sharpen until we’re ready to actually create a file for printing.

And then in Lightroom Classic, and it’s going to be different in Photoshop and Capture One, in Lightroom Classic, I suggest you create a virtual copy. Once you’re getting ready to print, crop that image for the aspect ratio that you are going to print it at. So, for example, if you’re printing a square, make sure that you’ve got it cropped as a square. If you’re printing a panorama, make sure you’ve got it cropped as a panorama. If you are printing to a specific paper size, make sure you’ve got it cropped to that specific paper size.

Then you’ll go to your print module, set the size, the pixels per inch for the output, borders, etc. I’m going to show you all this in a moment. And then you will print either to a file or directly to a printer, depending on whether you’re going to print it on your own or you’re going to have a lab print it.

So let’s take a look at what this workflow looks like. So here’s a picture of my son and grandson that have just caught a bluefish. And as you can see, I’ve already done some global adjustments and I’ve decided that the picture is the way I want it, with the exception of, I don’t want my son’s friend and his son in there. I want to crop this out to an image of just my son and my grandson.

So I’m going to go into the crop tool, and I’m going to crop this down to a fairly smaller image. And whereas before I had 3,000 pixels on the short side and 4,000 pixels on the long side, after I’ve cropped it, I’ve now got 2,600 pixels on the long side because I’m using less of the image.

So if I take 2,600 pixels on the long side and I divide it by 300, which is I want 300 pixels per inch in my print file, that means I can print without interpolation an 8.8-inch image on the long side. So I’ve decided I’m going to make this a 5×7.

Well, this crop is 2×3, which is not exactly 5×7. So I need to go actually back into the crop tool. And over here, I need to set this as a 5×7 aspect ratio. So you can see it made the image just slightly narrower, but now I’ve got a 5×7. So once I select that, I’ve now got a 5×7 aspect ratio image.

I now move into the print module and I set the parameters in the column. I’ve got custom file dimensions here. I’m making a 5×7 print. And as I scroll up here, I’ve got no margins. And I’ve got a grid that only has one image on it. And it’s a five by seven-inch image.

One thing to note about Lightroom Classic: see this white line on the side? It always shows up and it never will print. It’s a bug that they have yet to figure out how to fix.

But I’ve decided that I don’t want to print this borderless. I want to print this with a white border. So I can use my margins here to slide over or enter values here so that I get margins, a white border.

And here’s something that’s interesting. As soon as you move left and right, so I’ve got a half an inch on the left and a half an inch on the right, when you bring them in on the left and right, it also brings it in on the top and the bottom because it doesn’t change the aspect ratio. So this is still a 5×7 aspect ratio with a border.

And I wanted a slightly bigger border on the bottom, so I added a little bit more here, but I didn’t add any to the top.

So now once I’ve got this done, I’ve got a 5×7 piece of paper, I’ve got a 5×7 aspect ratio image, and I’ve got my white borders. And now I can print to a file or I can print to a printer.

So once this file is ready to save, I suggest that you always print to a file and put it in your print-ready folder. That way you know that this file has been prepared and is ready to print.

Gosh. So now let’s look at what it looks like in Photoshop.

Yeah. So I do a similar thing, you know, flatten, size, crop, sharpen. And if I want to make it a different size, then I go back to the non-flattened, sharpened, whatever image. I don’t ever go to print-ready to change the size to make it another print.

Anyway, we can go to the next slide.

Yeah. So here I have this image and I’m gonna get it ready. I’m gonna open it in Photoshop. So basically this image is in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom, depending on, you know, like I just opened it. So if I click Open, it’ll open it in Photoshop. So the next slide should be it opened in Photoshop.

Yeah. So it’s in Photoshop, and then I’m looking at the image size dialog. And I don’t look at my images in pixel dimensions because it makes my head hurt. So this image, without any interpolation, is 18 and a little over 18 by a little over 27 at the resolution my camera shot it.

And I’m gonna make it, I don’t remember what size I decided to make it, but oh, right. We decided that we were gonna make a 30 by 40-inch print. So I’m going to upscale. I’m resampling it. I’m going to make it 30 by, eventually, 30 by 40. So I changed the height to 30 inches. And now I’m going to say OK.

And then, yeah. So here I am. I’m going to make it 30 by 40, so I’m just going to crop it to 30 by 40. And this is the crop tool. So I basically, you know, move the slider over. You can see there’s image over to the right that I’m cropping off. I’m pointing with my hand and you can’t see me, so that’s pretty funny.

So then I’m going to click OK to crop at 30 by 40.

And then, oh, yeah. If you look at your image before you print it at 50% magnification, that’s what it’s going to look like as a print. So if there’s something yucky in your image and you can see it, if you zoom in to 50%, then you’re for sure going to see it on your print. OK, that’s why I did this.

And these are like really weird airplanes doing a really strange, I don’t really know what they were doing. But I look for the sensor dust and stuff at 100% magnification, but I look at an image for printing at 50%.

OK. So what was the next slide?

Yeah. So Michael was talking about adding a border. In Photoshop you can add a border really easily with Canvas Size. So if you open the Canvas Size dialog, you can add inches on either side. You can add it relative. I think this one I put two inches all the way around. So if I click OK on this, then I get an inch all the way around because I said two inches. So it’s an inch on each side. And you can make the canvas however big you want and move the image around. It doesn’t change the size of the image.

Yeah. So there’s that. Does somebody have a question? Yes, you’re on mute.

Oh, maybe no one had a question. So, no matter what software you use—

Sorry, I did have a question.

Oh, great. Go ahead.

Sorry. Somehow I shrunk my Zoom thing. My question is, when you’re enlarging an image, have you noticed anything with the enlarging software where you can only maybe go two times the original size, or whatever the multiple of the original size, before it starts to introduce artifacts and kind of ruin the image?

Yeah, I mean, it depends on the resolution of your camera. Mine’s, I don’t know, 50 megapixel or something. There’s some tricks that you can do where you turn off resampling. So, say I’m making, I did a four-foot by seven-foot panel for a client one time, and I have tricks that I do where I click off resampling and I make it 150 pixels per inch because the viewing distance for a four-foot by seven-foot is like, you know, eight feet, and you don’t really need 300 pixels per inch. So you don’t need to really do all that interpolation. So it really depends on the size you’re going for and how close people are going to be able to get to it.

But a lot of people interpolate like crazy on things that they don’t really need to. So I don’t know if Michael has any other—

Well, it also really depends on the content. I mean, if you’ve got people’s faces and there are lines by the eyes and that sort of thing, and you start stretching the pixel count on that, it’s going to start looking really weird.

I have a print though I did this summer that was just sort of undulating waves on the ocean. And I shot it on a D300 about five years ago, which was, I think, 24 megapixels, and I printed it eight feet wide and used Gigapixel to interpolate it, and it looked absolutely perfect. So, you know.

So the tricks are, for large things, lowering the resolution down to 240, or sometimes even lower, and then picking your content. And then when you use some of this software, like the Topaz software, there are a lot of little settings in there that you don’t really want the software to interpret. You want it to interpolate, but you don’t want it to interpret, because it’ll start using AI to figure out what it probably should look like and sometimes it really messes up.

So I don’t use the AI portion in Gigapixel. I just use the interpolation, the pixel interpolation. And I find much better results with that. When I tried some fancy software for, I just did, they’re going to be upstairs at Handfire Pizza, I just did this really cool dead tree skier photo for a client of mine and I tried to interpolate it, and it just churned itself to death.

So I did it my way. I have like a fussy, crappy way that I do it and it turned out really great. So it takes a little help if you are going big. You know, I’m happy to help. So is Michael, I’m sure. Get help, get the image where you want it.

A lot of stuff though, you can just say, you know, resample in Photoshop or Lightroom, and it’s totally fine. Yeah, if you’re only going, you know, 20 or 30% larger.

So like, for example, in this image here, Kathy had this and so she ended up going to 13,000 on the long side, which started out as 8,000 on the long side. So she almost increased this by 60 or 70%, and it’s perfect. And Photoshop did a good job. But if you want to go like 4x or even bigger, then you need other software to do it.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. To emphasize what Michael and Kathy said, certain subjects don’t work nearly as well. Like if you have a severe crop on a bird, feathers, trying to upscale them, especially with the AI upscaling, you can get some really strange results. You just have to play with it and look at your subject matter.

Yeah. So, and then, you know, I always do what Michael does too. Everything that’s sharpened and ready to print goes in print-ready because I want to know that’s what I printed and I don’t want to go back and edit that. And mine, at that point, are all JPEGs. And you don’t really want to edit and re-edit a JPEG because it’s a lossy format. So every time you open it and close it, you lose information.

So I put them in the print-ready folder and then I use my printer, or, well, I print for me, so I use it to create the print, or use your lab to create the print.

Yeah. So once a file has been output as a JPEG and it’s in your print-ready folder, it is done. It is cooked. It is final. You cannot touch it.

If you look at it, and what I tend to do is I look at these images on either another computer, sometimes I even look at it on my phone before I go to print it. And if anything looks off, then go back and do your reprocessing, and then create a new JPEG to go in your print-ready folder, because that is the master file that you’re going to print from.

And if you ever want to print it twice or three times or whatever, you want to know that that file is final. And so once it’s done, then you’ll either print it on your own or you’ll print it at a lab.

Well, and your printer will thank you if it’s actually a JPEG in the end and not a TIFF, because they’re giant. But I take anything.

So, yeah.

OK. I think we just—

One other question.

Yeah. Will you, at times, like, make a small, let’s say you’re going to print 12×18, but you just want to make sure the print looks right as far as the color, whatever, will you print like a 4×6 first just to take a look at it?

Sure. I mean, I’m at a point now where I know what it’s going to look like, but a lot of times I do proofs for clients, especially if they’re doing something that’s like, you know, four feet by, you know, it’s big, big. They might want to see the four-foot by seven-foot panel. I actually took a life-sized chunk out of one of the important parts and just printed that so that they could see what that would look like when we do the giant panel. So, yeah, I do a lot of that kind of stuff.

Definitely. There’s another step that we’ll talk about in a second, which is called soft proofing, where you can use your monitor to emulate how it’s going to print. And it’s certainly not as good as an actual test print, but it helps.

But I’m a very big believer in test prints. I have them all over my desk here. Test, because you just don’t know what you’re going to get. And yeah, it’s good to know.

Did you have a question? Somebody else?

I had a quick question because I’ve never done a print-ready folder. Is that something you keep in your Lightroom Classic catalog, or is that something you keep on your computer, on a hard drive?

Well, for me it’s a folder on my hard drive because I don’t use Lightroom Classic, but Michael can answer.

So, for me, it’s also a folder outside of Lightroom. My folder happens to be called “JPEGs Prepped for Printing.” And it’s on my external hard drive. And I actually name my prints, my JPEGs that are ready, I name it what it is, dash size by size, 30 by 40, at the number of dots per inch, or pixels per inch, that I produced it at. So it might say, you know, “Cindy’s head shot 20 by 24 at 300.jpg.”

So at any moment I can see, because I might have two or three images that have been printed at different sizes, so I can discern which one is which one.

Great. Thank you.

So the one thing I learned really early on when I started—

They’re recording this and we need to watch it again. They’re doing a good job. It’s being recorded.

The club. I’m listening to the club.

OK, you need to mute. Sorry.

Anyway, so the one thing I learned really early on was that things in your picture don’t seem to look like a problem on your screen until you print big, and then they are.

So, some of my favorites. I go through the image at 100% and I look for these things, but I also look for them, and we both have some examples, I think, of some things that have gone wrong.

I call sensor dust “goobers in the sky,” because, well, and goobers in the sky are also caused by over-sharpening your sky, which makes big chunks of blue in your sky.

Anyway, small signs and items that you don’t even notice in a normal size print, like even a 16×20, you probably won’t notice it. But in a 30×40 or a 44×70, you’re going to see it.

I had a, I don’t have the image of this anymore because it was long, long ago, but my first print I did big was 44×70. It was a moose out by the airport, and the sage brush that hit his belly really didn’t look like sage brush anymore. It looked like anatomy. So I had to go back and sort of edit it out because it didn’t look pleasing.

Michael has an example of white edges that happen when you’re making black and white images. And “look carefully twice” is a good Michael-ism. Do you have anything to add?

Nope. But we can look at a couple examples.

Yeah. So here, where my arrow is pointing is actually a little sign. You guys know where this is. This is at Wendy Point. And that little sign in a big print is going to be a really big sign and it’s going to look really not great.

The next one, I think is—wait, I think there’s a little tool. No, that’s not working. I thought I could sort of expand this, but maybe not. Oh, unfortunately. Probably not.

This one really happened. So, where my arrow is pointing, that little teeny spot is an interpretive sign. And when this giant canvas, which was probably 42×60 or something, came out of the printer, it was like a four-inch-across interpretive sign and it really wasn’t pleasing.

And I ended up having to edit it out and remake the canvas for my client because neither of us saw it. And you can’t have that. So anyway, that’s one of the things I really look for now.

Or it could be a flower at the edge of water, and it looks like a flower in your smaller print, but it just looks like a white blob in a giant print. So you have to look for things that may actually be there, but won’t be pleasing in a big print.

So this is something that I see a lot. You know, we love these sort of dark—oh, speaking of goobers in the sky, look at that right there. Yeah, there’s—And there’s another one right there. And there’s another one right there. Anyway.

We love darkening the skies when we do black and white conversions, but I’m sure you guys have seen this, which looks like this, because it happens in sharpening and it happens in darkening because the algorithms don’t perfectly meet these edges.

There is a very easy way to fix this, but it’s something that you see far too often, and it will print terribly. So it’s something that you really do want to fix.

You can kind of see it down the side of that too, which was interesting. I didn’t see that before. You can kind of see it down the right side too.

You bet. Yeah. Anytime it’s really dark, you’re going to see it. Because you don’t see it as much here. You can see it right over here a little bit.

Yeah. Yeah.

But it’s really easy to fix. I can tell you how to fix it. And you guys can try it with experimentation. If you use the magic wand tool in Photoshop and you highlight this whole thing right here, and you’ll see the little ants crawling all on the edge, that tool does a very good job of finding what’s inside the white.

If you then duplicate that selection to a new layer and then, using your arrow key, move it up and over two pixels, it’ll cover the white and you’ll never see what you’ve done. It’s remarkable.

If we have time later and you want to see one, I’ll try to demonstrate it live.

So, let’s talk a little bit about monitor calibration. The colors on your monitor—if anyone has ever gone to a computer to look at the Benjamin Moore paint colors, and you picked a paint color, and then you went to the paint store and you had that color mixed and you put it on your walls, it doesn’t look like what you saw on your computer. That’s because monitors need to be calibrated.

And whether you’re shooting in sRGB or Adobe RGB, there are things called gamuts. And there are certain colors that show up and certain colors that don’t show up. Orange looks red. Red looks maroon. All kinds of crazy things happen.

But it’s really simple to make sure that when you send your print file to a lab, it comes back looking like it looked on your screen. And you do it with a calibration puck. I’ll show you that on the next screen.

And in addition to that, you also need to calibrate the combination of printer and paper and ink that you’re going to use. Different inks produce different colors on inkjet printers. Different papers absorb colors differently.

So there’s something called an ICC profile that you can look up if you have your own printer and paper combination, or when you work with a lab that provides ICC profiles. And ICC profiles are a piece of software that you can stick into Lightroom or stick into Photoshop. And then there’s a little button on the bottom of Lightroom, or on the top of Photoshop, called “Soft Proof,” and it will apply the profile to your screen. You’ll see the picture will actually look different as a way of emulating how it’s going to print on that paper/printer combination that’s represented by that ICC profile.

But the first thing you have to do—oh, look at that. I know you’ve got like a party going on. Did I go like this? Is that what it was? Or did I? I don’t know. It happened earlier too.

The first thing you want to do is get one of these pucks that hangs on the front of your monitor, and you push a button, and all sorts of colors flash on your monitor, and it takes, what, three minutes? And it will, depending on what kind of monitor you have, the software for the puck will actually change the settings on your monitor to calibrate the color so that the color that you’re seeing on your monitor is the color that you’re going to see on your printer.

And I said before that many monitors are too cool, so things look a little bit too blue on the screen, which means they’re going to look too warm in print. So you want to warm up your monitor so that you counteract that warmth when it comes out to print.

But you can do this with a calibration tool, and they recommend you calibrate every couple of months. I don’t. I calibrate maybe once a year, and I find that my monitors—I use an NEC and a BenQ—that they hold calibration really well. Kathy, any notes on that?

The way, just in short, the way this works, right, is it plays the colors and the software knows, “I’m playing red, whatever number,” and when it sees it’s not the red that it’s playing, then it adjusts your monitor to be that red. So it goes through a whole range of colors. Mine takes more than three minutes, but it goes through a whole range of colors and it knows what it’s playing. So it knows when it doesn’t see it that it’s going to change your monitor to be what it should be. So it’s a really great tool to have because it makes such a difference.

Yeah. On the screen side of that puck is actually a camera. So as the software starts flashing colors on the screen, the puck is reading the colors. That’s how it works.

Yeah.

OK. So, when I was starting to teach printing stuff to people, I thought, well, maybe I should try to print like a normal person does. And I was watching a bunch of videos on how to print from Photoshop, because I’ll talk in a little while about how I don’t do that.

And then I had this whole video about how you could calibrate your camera, and I thought, well, none of my clients are ever going to do that. But then I realized I photograph art for people. If you do any kind of studio photography, this is like monitor calibration for your camera.

So basically, you shoot the image of the art or the person or whatever in your studio, in the light that you use, and then you shoot it with them holding this gizmo. And basically there’s a software shim that you run. I use it in Photoshop. You can use it in Lightroom. That basically makes a calibration file for your camera and does the same color management that the puck does to your screen.

And boy, photographing art got so much easier when I discovered those. So much easier. I can’t even tell you. And they’re really pretty inexpensive. And I just keep it in my little studio and I hang it down in front of the art and shoot an extra picture with this in it.

So there’s that.

OK. So color spaces. OK. sRGB is—so I liken this to a box of Crayola crayons. When you’re a kid, you always wanted, you know, you always got the eight pack of Crayola, but you wanted the 64 pack.

So sRGB is like the eight pack of crayons. Adobe RGB is like the next size box. And then ProPhoto is like the one with the sharpener in it, the giant one.

The biggest color space you can get out of your camera is Adobe RGB. And I recommend that everybody set their camera to Adobe RGB. I don’t use ProPhoto RGB because it’s creating more color. Like, I get Adobe RGB out of my camera. I’m not going to just run some software thing to create more color where there isn’t any.

And you can always, they recommend sRGB for the web. You can always take away color. You can always convert it to sRGB. But the biggest box of Crayola you can get out of your camera is Adobe RGB.

And everybody—there should be, isn’t there a camera setting thingy on the next slide?

Yeah. So this is the back of a Canon, but there’s a color space there should be in whatever you’re shooting, and you can change it. The default is always sRGB, but I really recommend that you get the biggest color space out of your camera that you can.

All right, let’s talk a little bit about sharpening. I am not a big fan of sharpening, and we talked a little bit about this earlier.

And just as a reminder, when you’re looking at 72 dots per inch on your screen and Kathy is going to print you at 3,000 dots per inch, there is so much more detail in the print than you will ever see on your screen.

So before you start racking that slider over, think about a few things. One of the things that happens when you sharpen globally is that you sharpen things that shouldn’t be sharpened.

And I’m not sure if you can see it on the Zoom, but can you see in here the purple and green artifacts? This is all from sharpening, this aberrant color. And you’re also creating these blotchy goobers up here, up here, up here. Look at the edge of this cloud. It looks horrible. And it creates all kinds of noise and other stuff here.

This over-sharpened mountainside creates texture that will never exist, and it doesn’t even look at all natural. It looks like it needs a haircut.

Yeah.

Here’s another one of those white edges that we saw a little while ago. And this is from excess sharpening. You’ve also got, it can make dark lines instead of white lines. Also, you’ll lose detail in the highlights when you start sharpening, because what sharpening actually is, is it’s finding two areas of contrast and increasing the contrast. So if it’s looking for contrast, it’s going to blow out highlights because it’s looking for contrast. So that doesn’t work either. And also you lose shadow detail for the same reason. If stuff is really dark, everything is going to merge together. And then finally, everything oversaturates. Like here you see blues happening down here and down here. Those things didn’t exist.

And this is obviously a drastic example of what happens when you over-sharpen, but you see over-sharpening, not quite to this extent, but you see it all the time.

Yeah. You know, so here’s an example. This is what the original file looks like on the screen. Here’s a little bit of sharpening. Here’s over-sharpening. You’ve got artifacts happening here. Look at what’s going on here from sharpening. Look at what’s happening in these little clouds in the sky. Look at what’s happening down here. I mean, look at what’s happening in the finger. This is all from over-sharpening. Not necessary.

And I think someone asked a question earlier about doing proof prints. Proof prints are a great way for you to see how much sharpening you actually need in the final printing file.

And lastly, you know, we talked about over-sharpening globally. You only want to sharpen the stuff that needs sharpening. And one of the ways you do that, at least in Lightroom, even in this old example of Lightroom 3, which is probably 15 years old, is if you hold the Option key down and you use this masking slider here. It’s going to go from white and then turn things black. And anything that is white will be sharpened. Anything that’s black won’t be.

You don’t want to sharpen the sky. So in this case, the masking slider was brought over to 30. You can even bring it up higher and reduce the amount of sharpening by area. As you bring this up, some of this is going to lose sharpening. Some of this is going to lose sharpening. You know, this stuff will stay in the sharpening mask.

But adjust your mask before you even add sharpening to it so that you know you’re only sharpening what needs to be sharpened, if anything at all.

Well, and I just want to say before we go on, there is no slide from me on how to do sharpening because I never sharpen. I mean, you can do something really similar in Photoshop, but I can’t remember the last time I sharpened one of my images because they just don’t need it.

I should probably say one more thing about this. When we talk about sharpening, we’re talking about sharpening sharp images. So if you’ve done your work in the camera correctly, you have a beautifully sharp image that you’ve been processing.

There are times when we make a mistake or we have motion blur or we have some focus blur, and there is software that can take a little bit of motion blur and actually create a sharp print out of it. That’s a whole different kind of sharpening. It’s not the kind of sharpening we’re talking about.

Yeah, there’s a Topaz product called Sharpen which will actually have various different types of sharpening in Photoshop. There’s unsharp mask. There’s motion. There’s all sorts of sharpening for things that are not sharp. But when I’m talking about “don’t over-sharpen,” I’m talking about pictures that are already sharp.

Yeah.

OK. Working with a lab. Kathy’s a lab. There’s lots of labs out there. Some people use Bay Photo. Some people use all kinds of labs. Print labs make beautiful prints because they know what they’re doing, and they do the same thing each time, so they get consistent results.

So my suggestion to you, if you’re going to work with a lab, is ask the lab for an ICC profile of the paper/printer combination that you are going to use. Different labs have different papers. Some labs have multiple papers, so they can send you multiple profiles that you can use for soft proofing.

You can soft proof in almost any good editing software like the ones listed here. And then I suggest, when you start working with a lab, send the lab five to eight images as test prints, 8x12s or 12x18s, so that you can do a couple of things. Check your monitor calibration against the colors in the print. Check the soft proofing against what the print looks like. Because when you’re soft proofing, you’re still looking at a backlit screen and it’s never going to look the same as a piece of paper. But if you hold the piece of paper up next to the backlit screen, you can train your brain to have a better understanding of what that soft-proofing screen is going to look like.

And you can also adjust the brightness of your monitor, bearing in mind the brightness in your room. You should always work in the same brightness, whether you keep the lights on or the lights off. Do it the same so that you see the file as best you can as to how it’s going to ultimately print.

And then try various papers. There are textured papers, matte papers, satin papers, luster papers, glossy papers. Each of them will print slightly differently. And you’ll learn over time which of your landscape pictures look better on luster paper, which of your portraits look better on matte paper, or what looks better on glossy paper.

I wanted to add one thing to that. Matte papers inherently have a smaller color gamut than glossy papers. By glossy, I’m talking anything that has a sheen to it. Luster, glossy, any of the glossy side. The matte papers have a smaller color range.

So, like when I print art that I’ve photographed, I have one painter who really, really likes matte paper, but she mixes colors that I can’t print on matte paper because the color gamut isn’t big enough. They print perfectly on any kind of glossy paper, but they print horribly on matte paper. So just something to be aware of.

Yeah.

[Music]

OK. So, I use a printer RIP, and if you come to print day, I’m happy to give you a tour. If you do a lot of printing, it’s completely the way to go. I use what’s called ImagePrint. I’ve been using it, I don’t know, 22 years, and the same tech support person has answered my questions the entire time.

But basically, it’s specialized software that knows your printer and your inks and your monitor calibration and everything. So when I drag your image into my print window, it basically soft proofs it because I’ve set all those parameters. So I don’t have to soft proof it anywhere except right on my screen when I’m going to print it.

I also only print on rolls. So I can put, you know, six or seven images or whatever on the same sheet for different clients at the same time on the same paper. It’s really, really, really handy if you’re doing a lot of printing, and I do.

So, yeah.

A couple of things I’ve learned along the way. You may or may not care, but if you do have your own printer, only take the cartridge out long enough to put the new one in. Don’t take the cartridge out and go to the store. Don’t take the cartridge out and put it in your purse. Don’t ever leave a cartridge out of the printer because you’ll get a clog and you’ll get dried ink, and you’ll have a nightmare trying to fix it.

If you do have an Epson, don’t do multiple cleaning cycles in a row. Do a cleaning cycle, do a nozzle check, print. Do a cleaning cycle, do a nozzle check, print. Because every time you do that, it knows to try harder. But if you do like four cleaning cycles in a row, it doesn’t know that the last one failed. I know it sounds really weird, but it’s true.

Expired cartridges are totally fine. Just shake them up. And also, for some of the big printers, they’ve gotten really smart about it and changed the chips. But it used to be you could get a chip resetter and you could repack your own maintenance tanks. So you didn’t have to keep buying maintenance tanks. When you do your nozzle checks and stuff, the ink goes into a bin, like a waste bin, and they’re kind of expensive. So I have a chip resetter on my older printer and then I just put new batting in the tank and I don’t have to buy a new one.

Anyway, my little takeaways.

So, this is a lot of information that we’ve talked about. Just remember, try to create a workflow and use it religiously every time. It’ll eventually become second nature. And we’ll just say that if you love your image on your screen, you’ll completely flip over it as a print.

And I know a lot of people don’t print their work. And if anything you take away tonight, just try doing some prints because you’re going to fall in love with the printed piece.

And we have time for questions, or to review anything that we went over. Ask away. I’m gonna stop sharing the screen so we can see each other.

Well, I’d also like to say, you know, submit an image. And even if we were full and we can’t print anymore, although I’ll try to squeeze in as many as I can if they let me. Oh, wait a minute. We didn’t do that part. We didn’t do that part. Oh, here.

But come anyway because I can show you the RIP. You can watch. It’s so much fun to watch images come out of the printer.

Yeah. So, print day. David, how many slots are left?

I’d have to count, but probably four at this point, or five. But we’ll take 15. Right now I think I have about 10 or 11 submissions. And if I get more than 15, we’ll have a lottery for who gets to print.

So, you’re going to get 16×24 prints at 300 PPI. You have to be there. And now you know how to prepare your images. So, OK. Now I’ll shut this off.

One other thing. Anyway, I’m sorry. One other thing I was going to say, if you’re still confused, bring it as a RAW file and Barney and I will probably be there to help you get it set up so Kathy can print it.

Well, and last time we had people send me images through my upload link, and I’m happy to look at them in advance and work with you on getting your image ready. So you can do it on the day too, but it makes—

Yeah, we prefer you send it in per the instructions, but if you’re just lost, we’ll help you get it set up when you get there.

Yeah. And also, there can be lots of things to shoot in my yard, so don’t forget to bring your camera.

Dan put a question out. When is this video going to be available to watch? Probably in a couple days, right, David?

Yeah, let’s see. What’s today? Wednesday. I’ll get it up by Saturday.

OK. Any thoughts or questions? Alfred, go ahead.

Thanks. Have the instructions for submitting an image been sent yet?

No. I’ll send those to all the people who, if you looked at the reminder that went out this morning, you’re supposed to send an email that I’ll get that says you either want to come and watch or you want to come and print. And I’ll put those all together. And if we have 15 people, I’ll send everybody an email with the instructions.

OK. On a completely unrelated topic, Michael, you mentioned earlier Nikon always has like 30 spots on it and you have to clean it every once in a while. And I’ve got a 1DX that seems to like to generate sensor spots from oil spots. What does everybody think about potentially doing a lab on sensor cleaning?

Yay. Yay. Yay. Good idea. Good idea.

Yes. I’m afraid to clean my own sensor.

I’ve cleaned mine, and I know it’s scary, but it works. You just got to buy the little package. I have the Arctic Butterfly.

Yeah. If it scares you, send it to the manufacturer.

Yeah. Well, I used to do it locally with a store in Texas, but there’s nobody around locally who seems to do it. So I’ve done it myself and sometimes I do a really good job and sometimes not so much. And it definitely works with mirrorless cameras.

Is it really quite bad with mirrorless cameras?

Right. Well, most of the mirrorless cameras—the mirror is actually protecting you from dust when you’re taking it on and off.

You said it’s worse? I didn’t hear the word.

Yeah, it’s, I mean, well, some of them have sensor covers. Like the Canons always put a cover over it before they turn the camera off, but not every mirrorless camera does that. And so if you’re in a dusty environment and changing lenses, be careful if you have a mirrorless camera.

If need be, Perfect Light Camera over in Idaho Falls does sensor cleaning.

Thank you. Yeah, I usually let them do mine. I just send mine back.

And I would say this: everything we talked about tonight relates to printing with modern inkjet printers. If you want to have a whole other topic, you need to go into analog printing like silver gelatins or platinums or other things. There are so many ways to get an image onto print. And I think I said in one of the meetings before, there’s as much to know about printing as there is to know about getting the photograph taken.

Yeah, for sure. Well, thank you. This has been great.

Terrific. I’ll try to get this up on the YouTube channel within the next few days. So, down with the link for the new YouTube channel.

Kathy and Michael, great presentations. Thank you very much.

You’re welcome. I hope you guys can all make it to print day. It’s super fun.

Hey, I’ll just say in closing that I’ve had Kathy do some large prints, some small prints. Her work is phenomenal, and she doesn’t toot her own horn very much, but she’s a really, really good printer.

I’ll second that. She’s done beautiful work for me also.

And it’s all fun to have them on the floor spread out there so we can step on them.

Yeah. So, I moved one of the printers into the living room because it’s way too cramped back here, and so it’s not the best light to be fussing with images on my screen, but it’s way more fun. So everybody can watch.

Well, any other questions?

No, thank you guys. It was great.

Yeah. Thank you for everything. That was good. Thank you.

And Michael, I’ll try to—I think the more I’ve thought about it, I think the thing about the color in black and white, I think it’s on Brookover’s machine at his work, but I’ll find it somewhere.

Yeah, we were having a discussion beforehand. Michael has some black and white prints that are printing weird colors. So we’re trying to ruminate on a solution.

All right. We’ll let everybody go. Thanks very much. Good night, everyone.

You, too.

Good.