Colour Management and Printing Workflows using the SureColor SC-P700 & P900

hello everybody i'm nat colson a photographic artist based in the uk welcome to the second video in our three-part series covering the epson sure color scp-700 and p900 i started my career working as a graphic designer in the late 80s and by the early 90s i was really getting heavily into print and at that time some of the first photo quality inkjet printers were coming out flash forward a few years and around 2003 i started my business in fine art photography since then i've done quite a lot of exhibitions i've shown my work in every kind of venue and a couple of years ago i opened my own gallery here in england so i do a lot of printing both of my own work and for my clients in this video i'm going to show you how to print from adobe photoshop and lightroom and also how to use the epson print layout software but first let's talk a little bit about color management in order to get the best quality prints you need to be able to trust what you see on screen if your monitor isn't correctly calibrated and profiled you may end up with prints that are too dark or the color isn't quite right these problems are very common but they can be solved easily if you use the right equipment and procedures so the solution comes down to using a calibration device in this case i'm showing the x-ray i1 studio and the i1 display you need to have a device to measure your screen or your printed output or whatever you're calibrating for you can't just do it by your eye and unfortunately you can't just do it in software either now i wholeheartedly recommend the color management solutions from x right your computer has a color management system built into it depending on whether you're using mac or windows it may be called something different on the mac it's color sync and a color space describes how many colors are possible so this means that a device has a color space like your monitor or a printer for example but image files also can have color spaces associated with them a large color space means there's a lot of colors possible and a smaller color space means that those colors actually don't exist so the goal of color management is to translate the colors from your image through the imaging pipeline so that what you're seeing on screen effectively is as close as possible to what comes on the printed output so to get accurate prints and by accurate i mean that what comes out of the printer is what you expect i mean you have to understand that you're never going to get a truly exact screen to print match because a screen is a transmissive device where it's you know putting out light and a print is a reflective thing where you know how the print looks is entirely dependent on the quality of the light in the ambient light in the environment and how it's reflected off a sheet of paper but i can tell you that if you calibrate and profile your screen and you're using good printer profiles then you definitely can expect to get pretty close screen to print match at least close enough that you can predict accurately how the print will come out but to start you do need to use a good display and unfortunately if you spend just 100 or even a couple hundred pounds on a consumer grade computer monitor that is never going to be accurate in terms of showing you the true colors of what's in your photographs realistically you need to be looking at sort of the five to six hundred pound range or the equivalent number in dollars if you really are trying to do good quality photographic work so you got to start with a decent display and then also you need to make sure not to set it too bright the biggest problem that i see sort of across the board is that a lot of people will unknowingly set their monitor brightness far too high and then of course when you make a print well the print looks a lot darker simply because what you're seeing on your screen is not correct or accurate as to what's actually in your image file so starting with a good display setting it to a correct brightness calibrating and profiling it those things in and of themselves will get you 90 percent of where you need to be for getting an accurate print and then you need to be using good quality printer profiles and by using the correct ones i mean most often you can get printer profiles from whoever made the paper so if you're using epson for example they provide printer profiles for all of their media so you need to use the correct and good quality profiles as well so now we're ready to get into photo printing so we've gone through a quick edit and some develop adjustments in lightroom and now we are at a place where we're ready to make a print so we'll just quickly you know establish some of the basic goals what we're trying to accomplish in our printing first and foremost especially in terms of photography as art we're trying to maintain the best possible quality but we also don't want to take too long doing it you know speed is important and you will find that the more that you do these things obviously the more efficient you'll get at it we need to keep our print workflow non-destructive and any of the other adjustments you'd make in lightroom or adobe camera raw you need to be able to change your mind or adjust things as you know as the need arises you need to have repeatable results and by this i mean that if you make a print today that you're happy with you need to be able to replicate that result you know six months or years from now and have a high degree of confidence that the result will be as good every single time that being said you need to still have some room for improvement and as the equipment improves as your methods and your skills improve as you're capturing better images i mean it is reasonable that your print should keep getting better and better quick overview of our printing workflow we're going to finalize the master file where you've got your original you're making your adjustments directly to it we are not going to make any adjustments or changes to our master file specific for any given print job you know you need to work up the master files so in and of itself you're pleased with it and then you would use derivative copies or you know separate print files depending on the print job that you're doing so you need to first finalize that master file where you're happy with it on on your calibrated and profiled screen you need to decide on the size that you're going to print and you do have a couple of different sizes to consider here one is the live image or how that the the printed ink sort of sits on the paper and then you have the sheet size so uh you know depending on whether using a cut sheet or a roll feed media there is you know some maths involved and you need to kind of be clear on the sizes that you're working with choosing your media is going to be down to you know not only budget and what may be immediately available but you want to be thinking in terms of picking each paper or canvas or whatever is your type of media should you know be a good match for the image itself now preparing print files especially if you're using these derivative copies i'm talking about specifically for each job this opens up a possibility that you can make some adjustments specifically for a given print condition going through your page setup and printer driver settings this would be something that you do enough to get routine and a set of habits that you can repeat you know again and again but realistically you got to check every one of these settings each time that you go through the job because you never know if something has been reset to the default or if maybe something has been left from another print job so i'm going to go over that with you checking the printer setup in terms of you know ink levels doing a nozzle check and then at after you've done all these things then you will cue the job for the output so here we are in the lightroom print module and i have this image i'll just use this as our printing example so within the print module in lightroom the first thing always to do is check your page setup and i do this first because your paper and page size here as well as things like orientation and scale that is also fundamental to getting set first because then that is what will lead to all of the other measurements in the settings that you would apply in the layout panel so the first thing of course is to choose the correct printer and i've got selected here the epson p900 i almost always try and print in portrait orientation which sometimes means making a page setup that is wider than it is tall for example if i'm using a canvas or a roll feed type of media but printing and portrait orientation always makes things a lot easier because this is generally the way that your your paper is going to be feeding through with the you know the the short side is is feeding through the printer so again i'll first select the printer because a lot of the paper options and sizes will be driven by what printer is selected for this example maybe i'll just change from a three and i'll just shift it to a2 now a2 is a sheet and it's going to be using default margins uh you can see that a lot with the epson p900 and p700 you know the current series of papers uh provide a lot of different options for how the papers are being fed through and that's actually selected first here in the page setup so that's very important that if you're using for example the front paper feeder that you would select that here really important because the rest again the rest of your settings and the the printer control panel stuff is going to be all driven by this selection make sure that we set the scale to 100 because we're going to have lightroom or in the case of photoshop which i'll show you next we'll have of the the apps can actually be establishing the scale but we want in page setup it's going to be going 100 and we're going to use portrait orientation so i'll click ok there now that i have set the page size to a2 the rest of the setup in lightroom has to do with how the image or multiple images may be positioned on the page in this case you can see on the toolbar here i've got just to use selected photos and i only have the one photo selected but if i select multiple photos then you see that i end up with a print job with multiple pages okay so i can actually select multiple images here and then lightroom will output each one on its own page that's only because of the way that these settings are placed if i wanted to put for example four images on one sheet of paper then over here on the layout grid now i actually skipped over one part i want to make sure you understand this i i am using what's called the single image or contact sheet layout style in a lot of ways this is the simplest most straightforward way to lay out a sheet and especially if you really are just printing one image then it's going to be a lot easier just to use this one rather than these packages which are designed for printing multiple photos at multiple sizes so with a single image or contact sheet all of the images whether it's one or more on a given sheet of paper are going to be at the same size which for our purposes here is perfectly fine so to to place these multiple on one page all i have to do is change our page grid so you see now where i had before i had four pages with one photo on each page now it's one sheet of paper with four images and then from here you can just adjust the spacing now you can also double click and enter in very precise values here and most of the time if i'm being careful and you know printing a you know proper job then i will absolutely be super careful and you know doing trying to do my maths as best as i can uh and and add things up here so that your sizes are exactly right now the most important thing in a layout like this of course is going to be what's called the cell size and down here at the very bottom this is saying the height and the width so each of these images then is is in a box effectively controlled by this sizing so you'll note that we're not seeing any guides currently if i go down here to the guides panel i can show the guides and now so now you can see how each of these images is placed within its respective cell i'm just going to go back to one image per page and we're going to say we want to print this say at 15 inches high by 10 inches wide okay so you just type that in exactly now you can change your ruler units up here so if you're more comfortable working in metric then choose that here otherwise in most cases uh i will enter in a specific size here and then adjust the margins depending on you know this size but it is possible though if you so if you start changing these then depending on the size of your sheet of paper and your margins and how it all adds up you see how it's it's starting to change here so you really got to keep an eye on that and so the main thing is to set your size and see when i try and put 15 back in well it won't let me because these margins up here actually you know kind of override everything so what if i just put these all to their minimum every printer is going to have kind of its own defaults for what's the minimum margins but then at least i can put in what is the exact size and you'll see that lightroom places it in the center on the sheet so for all intents and purposes this print job is ready to to go right i mean let's say we're happy with 10 by 15 inches on an a2 sheet we've already done the page setup and and selected the the printer and the paper size we've set the layout just close these panels and next you go down to the print job panel now first and foremost we do not want to be using draft mode because as the name implies that's not best quality that's just going to be a very quick low resolution preview make sure that you are that you have selected that it is going to the printer rather than to a jpeg file now print resolution may be a little bit confusing if this box is checked then lightroom will resample or resize the images using this number of pixels per inch for each image regardless of what the original native resolution may be if this is unchecked then lightroom will send the print job to the printer using whatever resolution it ends up being okay so i think in most cases unless you're absolutely sure of the resolution this image would be at this size you're probably better off just leaving that checked and then on epson printers 240 is kind of our sweet spot that's ideal sometimes i may go up to 360 but that is extremely rare most of the time i'll do 240. now those are uh multiples of kind of magic numbers that just nicely match up with the uh the arrangement and the the sizing and alignment of the uh the the piezo print heads uh the the the nozzles on the uh epson printer so 240 is kind of our our sweet spot there print sharpening i would always add some print sharpening depending on the image and how much it's being enlarged and what's the resolution standard is fine you can choose between matte or glossy media type matte is going to be a stronger amount of sharpening than glossy and then it 16-bit output again we don't have enough time really to get too deep into this but if your image is 16-bit or it's raw and your printer driver supports 16-bit then on some images having 16-bit you know can provide a better quality potentially maybe in in smooth gradations like in this this type of area but for most images for example like this image you would never see a difference whether or not it was printed as 16 bit or not so i i generally don't bother with 16 bit output the rule of thumb is if you don't need it leave it unchecked so next we'll go down to the color management section of the print job panel this is one of the most important parts of setting up the print job in lightroom first we want to make sure that lightroom is using the correct printer profile to output this job we do not want it managed by printer this means that the color management is going to happen through a printer profile now apologies that this menu is cut off but you can see here that there are a few printer profiles in this menu that had been registered previously if i click other and then open this window you can see these are all of the printer profiles that are registered on this system and so let's say if i want to use luster photo paper then i would check the box here click ok and now you see lightroom has loaded that profile this is the best way to ensure correct color management not letting the printer manage it now the rendering intent for most jobs i use relative the only time i might use the perceptual intent is when there's some very maybe saturated colors or color relationships between a very saturated color so it if you're really into fine tuning your color management you owe it to yourself to learn a little bit more about how perceptual and relative rendering intents work but most of the time i will use relative i do not apply any print adjustment here these controls are very crude and they're really you know not a replacement for using correct color management procedures as especially if you've got a good quality computer display and it's been profiled and calibrated correctly then using a the correct profile this should give you a good match so you should not have to be doing much down here in terms of print adjustment now that i have selected the color management options and chosen the profile next i will go to the printer dialog box here and when i click the printer button this brings up the print driver panel the software and the options that you actually are seeing in this section are all provided by the epson printer driver okay so the first thing i have gone down to printer settings and we want to choose the type of photo paper now on the latest versions of epson printers if you if you choose use printer settings then the media type actually is determined on the the printer itself using the control panel but we can still we can choose a photo paper luster print quality let's just say quality options this gives you a range of slider adjustments here so you can choose now for almost every photo 1440 is going to be totally appropriate black enhance overcoat is a black boost effectively that are with the latest versions of epson printers this is an option that lays down some additional gray inks actually that will give deeper shadows high speed means that the the printer head will print on both passes as it's going across pretty much i'll always just leave finest detail but these are the settings really that you want to see that the media type is either selected by the printer or if you've got an older printer then you have no choice but to just make your best selection here now as long as this matches up with what you've chosen as your profile then you should be good to go and when you go down here and go through some of these other options again all of these settings are being controlled by the printer driver itself if you click on advanced color settings you'll see that we are using color sync so this is a correctly color managed job if you come in to your print dialog box and you see anything other than this then something is wrong and if you're using the mac it could be that uh that your printer is set up to use airprint and that's not the correct way to do it i would recommend that you do a little research and learn about how you need to install the correct epson driver settings and never ever use airprint on mac these are the settings that you should see when you come into the print dialog box and at this point then i am ready to click the print button and send the job to the printer so as you can see when you've got a lot of images to print lightroom can be a great choice but usually if i'm just printing one photo i'll use photoshop now to print this photo in photoshop takes a different set of steps so here we have the image opened in photoshop and before i go into the print screen i think i will spend just a quick minute showing you the soft proofing option that i mentioned earlier so under the view menu if i choose proof setup and then custom you'll see that this window comes up that allows me to preview on screen what this image will look like when printed to a certain printer using a certain paper here's some that i have saved from before so if i go to premium lustre then you can see that photoshop is simulating on screen uh what this image would look like on my epson 9890 using epson premium luster and then you can see there's a preview box here we can check and uncheck so you can see that in the soft proof condition it's a little bit duller uh or you know not as vibrant and saturated the color uh is maybe a little bit cooler there's a little bit of a blue tint uh it's not as contrasty there is one option here that isn't on by default though and that's this simulate paper color that is really important to have on because you'll see that without simulating the paper color there really is not much difference at all in your on-screen preview i mean you really need to be seeing what is the color of the paper now all of this really is preempted by the need for having your screen calibrated and profiled if you're not able to trust what you see on screen then doing a soft proof like this really is not going to be any good there's no point in doing it unless you have a very accurate display but presuming that you've used one of the x right products and calibrated profiled your monitor and you've set your brightness correctly then i can tell you that using this soft proof is a really good way to train your eye to seeing how the image will look when it's printed under these conditions now here again is the rendering intent just like in lightroom and you can choose between perceptual and relative and you can see an on-screen preview of how each of those would look now lightroom does also have soft proofing in it and when you soft proof in lightroom one of the options is that you can create a copy a proof copy of the image so that you can make adjustments directly onto it and this gets back to using a derivative files where you're proofing to a certain condition and then maybe you want to make some slight adjustments like maybe you'd want to pump up the contrast or increase the saturation or or take a little bit of that blue hue out you would do all of those types of adjustments using your soft proof but you'd have to be doing that on a copy again because we are not going to modify our master file just for this one print job because there's nothing that says you might not be using a different printer or a printer model or a different paper uh or you know some other conditions in the future so you need your leave your master file intact and only do your soft proofing and any edits based on soft proofing using copies of the files okay so i'm just going to cancel out of this so we're back to our normal preview here now to print from photoshop i'll go under the file menu and go to print now this brings up the print window let me just fit it into the screen here okay so you can see that you know the the print setup is quite different so the first thing again i need to choose my epson p900 then just like in lightroom we need to choose that for color handling we don't want the printer managing the color we want photoshop managing the color and we want to choose the correct printer profile and we do it exactly the same as we did in lightroom where you have the profile selected in here so now photoshop will send this print job to the printer using the settings contained within this profile okay now you notice the size you can see that the the the image is cut off and it's not positioned correctly on the paper one of the tricky things about printing from photoshop i'm just going to cancel here quickly one of the tricky things about printing from photoshop is that you really want to size and rotate and set everything on your image file to exactly what it is that as you want to print it before you actually open that that print window so that what you're sending through the print screen uh is you know that you're not doing any enlargement or rotation or anything like that in the print window you need to do it on this image for you know for the most reliability so to do that i'll go under the image image size and just using our example that we did in the last the last one i want to use 15 by 10 inches at 240 pixels per inch i'm going to use resampling and i'll just put this on automatic that's usually your best bet so 10 by 15 inches 240 pixels per inch let photoshop resample this image and there we go so i'll just zoom in a little bit here all right so the other thing is that as i mentioned earlier i always like to print in portrait orientation so to do that i'm actually going to rotate this so if i go under the image image rotation 90 degrees clockwise okay and i'll just fit this into the window okay so this is actually how i'm going to print this job right and the reason i do this is because the positioning and scaling of an image in photoshop using these controls is really unpredictable and very difficult and you'll waste a lot of time and a lot of paper and ink so if you just size it to what you want maybe sharpen it i didn't do any additional sharpening i'd probably do one pass of unsharp mask print sharpening on here before going into here at this point then because i have selected my printer profile i'm just positioning it central on the page i've got the correct printer chosen here if i go into print settings then at this point when i choose my paper size and again if i go down to these same options as what we saw in lightroom that i can use the printer settings or i can use luster photo paper print quality right so it's exactly the same uncheck that black enhance overcoat probably best only for certain types of images but this is what you want to see and it really does look exactly like in the uh the print driver in uh in lightroom and it's because we are actually looking at epson sort of software here this is provided by the printer manufacturer not by by your print software but not by photoshop or lightroom this is printer driver stuff so you would always set this up the same way and this is what i meant earlier when i was talking about you know having a sequence of steps the way that you set up your print job in the printer driver here the only things really that you would be changing is your media type you know maybe on rare occasion you know the resolution or the quality right and and maybe some of this stuff but it's it this is all like minor adjustments whereas as long as you've got the correct media type selected here and as long as you have photoshop managing the color with the with the profile here your color will be accurate and at this point then i can print the job so over the years i've done most of my fine art photo printing from photoshop or lightroom but now photographers have a new option and it's called epson print layout so here we are in epson print layout and you can see that the window interface is quite minimal i would just point out a few things about the interface to make things a little easier for you first of all you can change the size of the window by dragging on the sides and the corner and you can see all of the panels resize you can change the size of the individual panels by clicking and dragging on these little tabs in the middle and you can also go full screen now i'm on a mac here you could do the same thing on windows but on mac it's clicking this little green button and now we're in full screen i'm just going to briefly go back to not full screen just to show you the process of getting the images into the program because it's a there are a couple of different ways to do it and one way uh using drag and drop would sort of presume that you can see your desktop so continuing uh briefly our tour of the interface you've got just a few basic menus up here there's not really much to be done up here so under the file menu the one command that you might use is open and the open command is epson print layout's way of bringing images into the program so if i click open you can see i've got a folder created here with images that i've previously saved out you may have already noticed but maybe it's worth pointing out that there are no editing controls provided here epson print layout very strictly is designed for laying out and printing your finished images so you'll need to use other software to get your images ready and then when you have tiffs or jpegs or other image file formats you can bring them into epson print layout to do the actual printing so again under the open menu if i select one or all of the images you can hold on a mac the command key or on windows the control key and select individual images if i click open now you'll see that the images get added in to this preview thumbnails area down here so these are the images that i had just selected and you can see i can go through and click each one now it's it's also worth pointing out that you may open up epson print layout and see some default page size and a paper size with a page setup and that is going to be one of the first things that we're going to need to set um as it stands now all of these images are being placed onto the same page size and we don't really know what that is until you look down here and see it listed 5.93 by 4.13 inches is our paper size and you've got a display also here for the resolution so obviously one of the first things we're going to need to do is set our paper size i'm going to come back to that briefly though first i'm going to clear out these images and show you another way to import or open your images into print layout so to remove images i'm just right clicking on these and choose eject okay so the two commands are open to add them in and eject to get rid of them now you can see i've cleared out the layout and you can see it says image not loaded okay so the other way to add images into epson print layout is by drag and drop so here's this folder of images and i've just opened it on my desktop i still have the epson print layout window in the background now if i select one or a few images i can drag and drop them right into this film strip preview area that sometimes i think is going to be a little bit easier than going to this open command and then navigating through your file system but it depends where your photos are stored and how easy they are to access so i'm going to go ahead and eject all of these again because i do want to bring them all in at once okay so i'll just do a select all drag and drop and now all of these images in this folder will be added in to epson print layout okay and now at this point i think i would like to go ahead and enlarge the window to fill the screen so i will just drag to resize some of these others and then there is also a zoom control here which is actually zooming into the layout as you can see okay so i've turned on my cursor utility so you can follow where i'm uh going on the screen with this little purple circle when i move the cursor okay so there's a sequence of steps like with most software that you're going to want to go through and in almost all cases the first thing you're going to want to do is is select the printer and choose the paper size before actually i just remembered one other thing before i get into that up here are these two buttons which control the visibility of the browse thumbnail area and this settings tab which is on the side so if you need more room you can open and close these if you open up epson print layout and your thumbnails or the settings are not visible use these buttons up here you can also save presets so as you go through and make changes to your layouts and your color settings then by all means it'll save you a lot of time to save your presets for later okay so again the first thing we want to do is select the printer so we'll start at the top here with printer settings so i have the printer selected the scp-900 and you can see any other printers registered and installed in your system would be visible here the next thing to choose just sort of working top to bottom is your media type now these are all the epson built-in default media types that come with the printer driver you'd have to refer to the printer documentation or or maybe the media documentation more accurately if you're using a third-party paper type that doesn't exactly match with one of these epson types there will always be a recommendation of which one to use for this example i'll just use premium photo paper luster the next setting here is paper size you can create your own custom sizes as well most of the time especially if you're printing on sheet fed media it's going to be a lot easier just to use the built-in standard sizes especially a sizes if you're working with with iso paper sizes but you can see it's got some north american paper sizes in here as well and a lot of the sort of standard sort of photographic print sizes are built in as well okay so let's just say we want to do a2 just to take advantage of what the p900 can accommodate paper source pretty simple choices here you've got sheet and whether it's sheet with margins or borderless as explained in video number one of this series i almost never print borderless so i most often would be using sheet if i'm using a cut sheet media but you can see that there's also options for roll paper as well as if you're feeding very thick poster board or other thick media through the front paper feeder then there's options here so maybe it goes without saying that you need to choose this very carefully and it needs to go sort of along with what you've set as your paper size these settings here are going to largely determine the rest of your options and your workflow as for how how the images are positioned onto the paper so the quality setting here this if you've been using the epson driver within photoshop or lightroom you would have seen this before these are all the most recent as of the recording of this video these are all the most recent uh settings that are provided through the epson printer driver and you can see that you know there's not a slider adjustment so you kind of have to do a little bit of research to know what each of these are in terms of the actual uh dots per inch resolution that's being printed and then you'll notice here also that there is a special selection for carbon black which is a special ink treatment provided by the p900 and p700 to really give you the deepest possible blacks okay but obviously that is only going to be really appropriate or useful on certain images with certain papers as well so i would probably normally use either high quality or max quality and uh you know this really does bear doing some testing of your own and your choice here might also depend on what media type you've selected so if we were to be printing for example on uh some of the newer fine art papers which generally use the ultra smooth media type your options are going to be different here okay so you've got standard or max quality because these are tied in to the media type so just understand that what you see in each of these menus changes on the fly and that's why it takes a minute for the all the settings to load and reload when you make a change so i'll just leave it on high quality there's another option provided with the the latest model of printers and the drivers and that's black enhance overcoat again similar to the carbon black this is to to boost your blacks and i would encourage you to do a little more research on your own as to what type of circumstances this is going to be most appropriate it's a little bit outside the scope of these videos okay so that is the printer settings panel i'm just going to close this up now and we'll go down to the next section which is layout so you've got the first menu is type and this is giving you some built-in previews uh and and layout styles uh to help with different types of prints so a gallery wrap is expecting that you are going to be wrapping the image around the edge of a set of gallery stretcher bars which i think is a really interesting and very useful function if you like to have your image wrap around the sides you see you can change the depth including putting a custom depth on it you can control how much overlap there is whether or not trim marks are actually being printed now you should note that these dotted lines these shouldn't print but these little corner marks will print okay and so you can also use uh mirror image as you can see that that's what it's doing here it's taking the width of the image and going inward and then reflecting that back out that's the the mirror image effect um if you choose none then this will just be uh added uh depth here uh unprinted canvas we can choose wrap image where it's actually effectively just cropping it to the the size of your canvas with the uh the sides just the image wrapping around and if if you're doing canvas wraps you know this is something that you're going to want to spend more time on and experiment with uh again a little bit outside of the scope of what we're doing now and same goes for template like all of these layout types have quite a bit more room for exploration and and setting up for your types of print jobs especially considering that once you've set all of these in here then you can create your own presets okay so again we're just going to use standard orientation now you can see orientation is the orientation for how it's shown on the screen as well as how the images are placed onto the page and you can see that as i choose a portrait oriented image it does change the orientation of the preview and here's a square one and you can see that it has automatically selected portrait orientation okay so the software is pretty clever in knowing or assuming that the orientation that you bring the image in that is the orientation that you want it printed and the idea here is that the the image would be each image would be positioned on the sheet to you know match the long side to the long side and then as it's going through the printer it will automatically switch so that the short dimension is the the edge being fed through the printer and then your images are being positioned on the page depending on their actual orientation okay you've got an option for scale to fit here i have to say i'm not really the biggest fan of something like this because we don't really know by checking this what exactly the size will be so i would prefer to uncheck that and set your size manually here so you've got a couple of other measurements here left and top these are margins right so as i enlarge these i mean they're going to be tied to the size as well so there's only so so much you can change without changing another one right so you work these sliders sort of together to get the positioning that you want now dragging them is not always going to be the easiest way if you know the exact size that you want to print these on the sheet then your best bet is to just enter them in now as is sort of similar to the other examples that i typically use let's use a 10 by 15 inch print on an a2 size sheet so in this case and i have only just randomly sort of stopped or selected this image as my example there's nothing sort of unique or special about this one i would point out though that this one is a two by three aspect ratio which you can pretty clearly see so i'm going to be using the two by three aspect ratio for my sizing whereas this one is not a 2x3 aspect ratio so let's just see what happens if we set our width and height to 10 by 15 which is a two by three aspect ratio we now go back to this one and you can see that it has its own settings so that really illustrates the fact that each image in this print job can have its own position and sizing on the sheet of paper which can be pretty handy if you are really trying to cue up a print job and do a whole lot of images at once so what you would do is go through one at a time each image and set your parameters here like let's say i want this one 18 inches by 12 inches and let's choose centered okay so that is that one at 12 by 18. this one let's say we want it at 10 by 15 centered okay now you think well this one i want the same as the previous one so i think this is a good time maybe to create a preset so i'll create a new preset and call it 10 by 15 and of course you can name these however you want i'll call it 10 by 15 landscape okay now when i get to this one i can just choose that preset okay so presets are really going to make things a lot faster for you even within a given individual print job okay here we are back to a vertical let's say i want this one to be 12 inches by 18 inches high and again we want to just center it so you can really quickly see that as i go through the positioning and sizing and scaling all of the measurements are very specific to each individual image which really can be a huge time saver this is actually quite a bit more flexibility than even what you get in something like lightroom where setting up a print job in this way with different sizes and aspect ratios would be quite a challenge within one given print job okay so one other thing that i haven't pointed out is that you can also print a uh an additional color uh in the margins and again this is going to depend on what is the size of your image on the sheet and you know what are you going to be doing with it in terms of mounting and framing so let's say we want this one at 12 by 18 and we want that one centered okay so you can see that it's really pretty easy to add an additional color as a as a border or a background in your margins okay so let's just say i've gone through all of my images and i haven't because i don't want to take the additional time now but let's say i've gone through and set all these i'll at least do this one as centered okay so now that we've gone through layout this section is all about color management and we've touched on color management a number of times in earlier videos the important thing here is that we never well i say never almost never i can't think of a situation where we want to allow the printer driver to control the color so one of the first things we need to do is change it to use icc profile okay and then you can see that the print layout software is pretty clever in that it has an auto selected based on your media type up here if you've chosen a certain especially epson printer media then leaving it on auto select is going to select the correct icc profile within your system assuming that it can find it and it's installed rendering intent as i've mentioned before is something sort of for your own study and your own testing whether you prefer one or the other i almost always print with relative calorimetric that's worth a little bit more research on your part always always always black point compensation must be turned on okay so under icc profile if i wanted to choose a different profile i can do that here let's say that i was actually printing on a third-party paper but that it was a good match to the epson premium luster for example i've over the years i've made some a lot of my own custom profiles uh you know for gold silk and some other uh third-party paper brands so i've gone through and made my printer settings i've done my layouts i've selected to use a profile at this point it's also worth considering would i want to save another preset for this and then i am ready to click print although you will note that there is an option for how many copies here when i click the print button you can see that it is actually sending the print data already so this is effectively bypassing all of the printer driver settings which normally would be the place where you'd be making all of not so much layout but certainly printer settings and color settings prior to epson print layout all of these were what you would do in the printer driver settings you can see that the printer driver is effectively self-contained within epson print layout and so when you click print it is going to the printer and uh and we'll start cueing the print job these examples i've shown you in epson print layout we're all based on using a single image per sheet of paper but you can also create layouts with multiple photos using drag and drop once you've made your prints you may want to think about mounting or framing and presenting your work and we'll look at that in our next video thanks for watching

Channel: Epson UK

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Id: bFQp9uo32u4

Length: 55min 26sec (3326 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021