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Printing Italy

Lesson 8 from: The Photo Printing Workshop

Alex Strohl

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Lesson Info

8. Printing Italy

Alex walks you through how to soft proof and print a bright photo of a majestic mountain lake in Italy on matte and lustre papers.

Lesson Info

Printing Italy

Okay now we shall print but before I do that I want to tell you about the different ways you can print. So there is the big three ways you can print is with either light room Photoshop or your printer manufacturers tool app. Um Canon has one called Canon Professional print and layout. I started using that one and I thought it was really intuitive to use but now I've been printing with lightroom lately just because all my photos live in that room so I don't need to get them out of lightroom into another tool again, just trying to be very efficient and streamlined just because I want to take all the tech out of printing. You know, just want to have it be this organic process where most of the time I spent is looking at a print and not tinkering with tools. So if you wanna simple way just roll with the right room and I'll show you how I do that. So I thought the best way to show you how you print is to actually print. So I've selected four different photos of portfolio photos that I like ...

and photos that also are going to present different challenges and are gonna be very different on paper with different papers. So I have a bright photo snowy photo dark photo with different hues of brown and then a photo at night. So all these should present their own challenges and we shall tackle them and overcome them together. First one italy. So I've chosen this photo because it has different, you know lights darkness in the foreground, bright in the background here. You'd almost think that the whites are clipped. Okay, you'd be wrong after that. There you go. Always hit jay in that room to see what's overexposed. Underexposed. Underexposed is blue over, exposes red with the paper. Anyways, it's always a little darker. So I don't mind leaving a little bit here. Right, so this photo is already edited. I don't need to get into the editing again. But now let's do a little bit of proofing. So this one because it's a bright photo. I think I'm gonna rock with matt going down luster. Now let's roll with that paper. So first things first I pull up the right profile for it. So matt obviously is drinking. Oh, darkness here. See the difference. Speaking of was going to be very dark first off because I'm printing on traditional paper, I'm gonna go four a half ratio like this right there. Okay, and now we can adjust this. I don't want to have the blacks to clipped. So my monitor should be at four or 5. This is a darker room, so a brighter room so I gotta give it a little more Okay, that's the beauty of my paper doesn't give you the most accurate rendering with profiles on the screen, but you've done it enough, you can feel it enough information in the sky. Okay, just as my print, I think it's gonna be pretty accurate let's give it a roll. So this is gonna be a sample. So we're gonna go 8.5 by page set up us letter. Okay do I need the whole page to be the friend? No se a little bit of pink you know make sure we're good, yep. Cell size is accurate to 8.5 by 11 P. P. I. Is good print sharpening standard here matt important to tell its matte paper and then here matt photo paper called management 16 bit print. Okay so my Prince come up colors look good. I like that. I think there's a problem with the contrast. Again that's the nature of my paper is just gonna remove a lot of the contrast there. So we're gonna address that. But in the meantime let's see how it looks like on luster. I've done the same print, lost your paper without any other modifications. So you can see what they look like side by side, luster's out. Way more contrast as you can see. Obviously lost your paper is gonna be more punchy more detail here in the foreground with the same exact edit. Um The blues look good, colors are pretty consistent between the two papers I'll say. So there you have it really the difference between two papers so you can also acknowledge that mad papers are slightly warmer luster is a little cooler but it hasn't affected the colors much even that more saturation is present in the luster. I think we can improve the map by giving him a little more saturation and uh I was telling earlier that printing improves your photography and editing this. I just noticed on screen but here kind of bugs me. I'm not a big fan of this dark spot so I'm gonna fix it right now too. See the difference here, warmer on screen. All of these monitors calibrated, still have warmer here, cooler here, bit more magenta here, a bit more green in here. So it's just important to make test prints, you can't just nail it from the first. Try exactly lose a bit of saturation so he's gonna crank it highlights, look good to me work on this dark spot here, so convenient. So again, it wasn't shocking on screen but it's definitely a bit annoying on printing. Okay, you can also do my white balance a little better here, some of the purple bringing more into the greens contrast, we can get a little more out of it, slight more. Okay, print it. So see there was pretty micro adjustments that I did, but this should be enough to get us going and get us what we want to be Printing Matt for the paper. second matt print has come off, just look at them side by side and adjust. So the upper part of the image. I like that much better. We've worked on the crazy vignette that was here. Way more saturation too. You can see here. Smidge more contrast the bottom, you can see it. And in the lake here highlights around check. I like this not a side by side pretty damn close for matt paper because any more contrast here, we'll just turn this into some sort of smudge. Not very nice thing to look at. Could obviously spend another 20 seconds fixing this again and it's still a little too dark. But aside from that we've achieved the print. So you see it took me three times to dial the print. The lesson here is really use small paper to do your tests and then go to the big one and also you'll get better with time and feeling it because it's a very intuitive process, right? It's, you can always explain why something feels right or wrong and it's very personal. So I'm doing my best to break it down for you. For example, the vignette up on the top of the image. I couldn't see it on screen. But as you print, it becomes real and it's only your own sensitivity. Who can bring it to where it needs to be in your own view. So now I have another image I'm gonna work on which is a little darker and a little more challenging. So I'm gonna work it on matt. I'm gonna start training, I'm gonna do the first test prints on Canon. Basic matte paper and then I'll move on to even try to match which is a higher point of paper. But I'll dial firstly at it less expensive paper, and then For the final one, I'll get the get on the board.

Ratings and Reviews

user c7bdd5
 

Thank you. Lots of good information. Well done.

Isaac Johnston
 

Through and also to the point! Well worth the watch, and I feel confident to print on my own now.

fbuser 517642fd
 

I would recommend it for anyone trying to understand the print process better but, I think Alex needs to work on speaking a bit clearer and maybe slow down a bit when he is moving his cursor around in LR as was difficult to keep up with him and to see what he was doing.

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