You’ve taken the Photoshop Foundations Printing Course, and now it’s time to fine-tune your skills! This exclusive live event is your chance to get real answers to real questions. Whether you’re struggling with ICC profiles, fine-tuning print settings, or getting your prints to match your screen, we’ll tackle the most common post-course challenges together.
Join me for an interactive session where I’ll address the biggest hurdles photographers face after completing the course. I’ll also share additional tips, live demonstrations, and troubleshooting techniques to help you refine your workflow and achieve even better print results.
Do you find that adjusting brightness and saturation in softproofing is usually all you have to do to get the print as close to the screen image as you want or do you typically make additional tonal/color adjustments?
For the most part, yes. Usually what I’ll do outside of that is a Selective Color ADJ layer to force more color into the print. It’s intuitive in that nature as the sliders are in CMYK. So you can push more C Y M or Black into a color using those sliders.
Blake, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the follow up. However, having watched the replay there was a question that I could answer for you. Someone mentioned Epson and printing at 360dpi. I religiously followed that process with one of my printers but in the Epson Life group on Facebook (Australian Based) Derek Mobbs explained that not all of the Epson printers use 360dpi. The printer I was using was an Epson 3880. Apparently more recent ones only use the 300dpi which seems to be the current normal nowadays.
When I buy a new printer this is one of the things that I’ll check out before using it.
On another note, a lot of the inks are outsourced. I had earlier bought an Epson 4900 which is bigger and accepts rolls of paper. Well, that wasn’t a smart move. I didn’t know enough about printers to utilise it properly and took over 12/12 before I installed it instead of getting someone to come and do it for me. Well, that’s when I discovered that the ink in a couple of the cartridges was outdated and not because I’d waited so long to use it but it was outdated when I’d bought the printer! I never got any satisfaction about that.
Remember when people used to get watches given to them when they retired? Well, I decided that this was going to be my retirement watch! NEVER buy equipment like that and think it’ll last as long as an old fashioned watch. Times and items move so fast that it’s not worth it. I’ve since discovered that that printer was a beast when it came to guzzling inks so I’m glad I bought the smaller 3880, a demonstration model, after that.
I’ve also tried a cheap Canon machine which also worked as a scanner. However, it too was another equivalent of gas guzzling so cheap in the beginning isn’t necessarily cheap in the long run.
As for outsourcing prints, last year I had a local company to print up a couple of things for me but when I got them home I discovered a scratch on one of them. That’s not good enough for me so it’ll be a new printer once I’ve decided which one to buy.
But one more thing. About 18/12 ago I had a photo book printed through a world wide company. It’d been a while since I’d made a photo book but this one was for an 18th and not all of the photos were mine. I found a video on YouTube in which the author advised about changes in the process. Papers had been updated and the printing options were different from what I’d used previously so I followed the advice. That wasn’t a good move. When the book arrived it had ink blotches on a number of pages. In the end the company closed my incident report and refused to compensate me. I walked and now tell others not to use their services. From what we were able to decipher it seemed as if the pages were slammed together before the inks had dried and the number was about 14 or so pages.
I just thought I’d throw the above into the mix b/c some photographers will go printer shopping (or even make their own books) at sometime and thought this experiences might help them in their decision making.