How to Prepare Photos for Print in GIMP 2.10

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'm gonna be showing you guys how to set up images for print I'll be using to point ten point eight for this tutorial which happens to be the latest version of at the time of this tutorial before I get into that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design.com as always we have tons of video and text tutorials on here so definitely check that out you can also enroll in my 2.10 photo editing from beginner to pro photo retoucher course on udemy and you could support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so here is the photo I'll be using for today's tutorial this is a photo that I took myself and I went ahead and edited this ahead of time and I'm not going to get into how to edit this photo for this tutorial just for the sake of time but I will put a tutorial on my patreon page on how to edit this photo so definitely check that out if you guys want to see that but this tutorial is more so centered around how to get your image prepared for print after you've edited this photo and I do want to say this is an x EF file but I went ahead and merged all of the layers onto a single layer after I edited this and I did that by going over here to image and then merge visible layers so that's how I got everything onto a single layer and in my case this happened to be a really large image and when I merged everything onto a single layer that just cut the image size down a lot and that's going to help speed up the process while I'm working in so once I have merged all of my layers onto a single layer I do also want to duplicate this image and the reason I want to do that is because I don't want to be working on the digital version of my image because the print version is going to be slightly different in colors so we do need to make a few image adjustments to it so to duplicate this I'm going to come over here to image and click on duplicate and this is a somewhat optional step because you really can just go to file save as and just save this as a new file name so click on the original name of this photo and I'm just going to name this for print you know I'll hit enter now we're working on a totally separate file so that we don't accidentally save over the digital version but now that we have a print version what I want to do first is I want to be able set up an ICC color profile so I can preview this how it's going to look when we print this on whatever medium we end up printing this on because the colors are going to look different on print versus digital for a variety of reasons mostly because your screens whether that's a computer screen like this one or a laptop screen are obviously going to be lit by some sort of display whereas if you print onto some sort of print medium it's not going to be lit by anything usually except for the light that's bouncing off of it so it's not going to be quite as bright it might not come out quite as sharp either depending on the printer and there's some other factors that are just going to make the overall color and just look of your image different on print versus digital so we're gonna set up something called soft proofing and I actually have an entire tutorial dedicated to setting up soft proofing using CMYK color spaces and that is highly relevant to what I'll be doing here today but I'll just show you guys how to activate the soft proofing real quick and I'll show you why it's important so come over to view color management and then I'll click prove colors and that's not going to do anything yet but next I'll come over to view color management and she was soft proofing profile so this is where you're going to need to know your ICC color profile so you can get that from your printer whether that's through email or from their website and once you download that ICC color profile you're going to want to know where you downloaded that file to so if I click on this drop down here you'll see I already have a couple of color profiles to choose from here but if it's not shown here I can just click on select color profile from disk and from here I can navigate to the folder on my computer where the color profiles are located and in this case I've already done that and so here I have all my CMYK color profiles that I downloaded from Adobe's color profile website and I'm just going to go with this top one here the coated color profile and I'll just click open and that'll set that as my new color profile and I'll click select and now our image is being soft proofed using that color profile so if I come over here to view and then color management you'll see this is checked if I uncheck it you'll see the colors are slightly different so let me just come back here go to color management and make sure that is checked and now we are previewing our colors of our image as they would show up in the final print so now that we have soft proofing set up we also want to make sure that our image is the proper size for print so we can preview this by coming over here to image and go to print size so here you can see the width and height of our image so in this case it's five by seven inches you can always change the unit right here and you can see the X&Y resolution so I have my image set to 300 when you're printing an image you typically want to turn the resolution up to 300 from 72 if that's what it's set to 72 is better for the web and I go over this and a lot of my tutorials you are going to want to do this using the image scale image tool and I'll go over that in a second so in this case I do have this set to a 300 X&Y resolution if I wanted this to be a larger image I would have to sacrifice some of my resolution right now or if I wanted this to be a smaller image it would gain some resolution so real quick I'll just demonstrate if I change this to 4 you'll see my resolution will increase versus if I change this to 10 my resolution will now decrease I just want to keep this to 5 and I'll actually just click cancel because I'm not making any changes here if you need to scale your image up or down while keeping the same resolution you have to use the scale image feature so you can do that by coming over here to image scale image and from here you can change your width and height without affecting the X&Y resolution or you can just change the resolution altogether so if this is set to 72 just crank it up to 300 and I'm just going to change this to inches right here and again I'm just going to keep all my settings the same make sure your interpolation is set to low halo or no halo that'll produce the best quality and again I'll just hit cancel so this image is set to five by seven and a half inches let's say I want this to be a pretty standard 5 by 7 inch image well I can just grab my crop tool here from my toolbox and I can come over here and make sure my fixed aspect ratio option is checked and I just typed 5 : 7 and now I can just click and drag my crop tool here I'm just going to drag this so it goes all the way to the edges here again I did want this to be five by seven inches so what I can do is come over here to the size and change my unit to inches and make sure this is set to five by seven so now we know that our crop is the right size and now I can just double click inside of the crop and now we have a five by seven inch image okay so the next step is going to be to start making the image adjustments to this so I'm gonna make sure that I'm clicked on this layer here and I'm gonna start by going to colors exposure I'm gonna make three image adjustments to this image to compensate for when we print this to some sort of print medium so for one I'm going to increase the exposure because it will lose a little bit of its brightness when it hits that print medium I'm also going to increase the contrast and then also increase the sharpening of the image both of those will also probably get lost a little bit once we print this so I'm going to start by increasing my exposure by a quarter or a half a stop so that's anywhere between point two five and point five for this number here and what I like to do is I like to just type point five and see how that looks versus typing the lower end of this 0.25 so that's probably not as bright as I'd like it to be so I'm just gonna stick with 0.5 for this and we could just do a preview so here's before here's an after and I'll just click OK so now that I've made this a little bit brighter I'm going to increase the contrast and so I can do that by coming over here to colors curves and I'm just going to click on the middle of my curve here and I'm gonna come down here to the left side and I'm gonna click and drag this portion of my curve down and this is adjusting the shadows of my image and then if I come over here and click and drag this portion up that's adjusting the highlights and as I mentioned in many of my tutorials this creates an S curve and s curves typically create contrast and then I can click on my preview option here so here's our before and here's an after obviously that's a lot of contrast I can turn this down a little bit if it's a little bit too much there and then I'll just click OK and now we've got a little bit more contrast the last thing I'm going to do is enhance this photo a little bit with the unsharp mask tool already sharpen this a little bit when I the photo but again I want to add a little bit extra sharpness to this before I print it so I'm gonna hold the Z key to grab my zoom tool and I'm gonna click and drag and release my mouse to zoom in a little bit on the models face here I'm gonna make sure I'm clicked on my main layer I'm gonna come over to filters enhance sharpen unsharp mask and for this particular image I'm gonna keep all of the default settings the same you can always make adjustments to these we can go ahead and click OK once you're ready so before I export this for print I just want to demonstrate one quick thing one quick tip that it's gonna help you guys out so if you're looking at this and thinking this is way too large or way too small for you know what I want to actually print this to keep in mind that how it's displayed on your computer right now is going to be different than how it's displayed on the final print medium so a couple quick things to note here number one is you want to come over here and make sure your zoom is set to 100% and number two you want to come over here to view and make sure dot 4 dot is unchecked and dot 4 dot is a setting within that assigns a pixel in your image to each pixel on your screen so whether that's a laptop screen or a computer screen so it's not going to give you an accurate depiction of what the actual size of your image is versus if you turned off or dot off it's going to compress your photo into the actual size that it's going to be based on how much pixels are in each inch so remember this is a 300 pixels per inch image which means there's 300 pixels crammed into each inch of this image and that's going to give us a nice high quality image but if you come over here to you can see now in my image window we have a more realistic look at how large this photo is actually going to be so this is zoomed in all the way at a hundred which means this should be exactly 5 inches by 7 inches or the size of my image so now we want to export this image to a file that's going to be uncompressed for our printer so that this prints at the highest quality possible if I save this as a JPEG it will compress the file so it'll be a little bit smaller may be easier to work with if you have some limitations on what size your image can be otherwise if you don't have limitations I recommend exporting this to a tiff file for print that's just going to maintain the most quality in your image because it's going to be uncommon pressed for the most part so to do that come over here to file and go to export as and you could choose the name of your file up here and you can choose the location on your computer where you want to save this and then come over here to select file type and you can come down until you get to ute if you click on that so now you can see our photo is a tiff file and then just hit export and I'm going to keep the compression set to none and hit export again so here is our final file without the soft proofing remember so this is going to look a little bit more saturated a little bit more sharp and also with a little bit more contrast than the final image will look and that's why we have the soft proofing here in so this is more of an accurate representation of what our final image will look like and this was our final photo here for the digital version so you could see how different these two files look and so just make sure ultimately that you're taking into account those differences before you go ahead and pay the money to print your image alright so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you guys liked it if you did please subscribe to my youtube channel on youtube.com slash Davies media design you can also visit our website at Davies media design com you can enroll in my best-selling photo editing course from beginner to pro photo retoucher on udemy and you could support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and I'll include a link to that as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 37,327

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2019, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, print, printing, resize images, resize photos, ICC Color Profile, Set Color Profile, GIMP Color Profile, How to Print in GIMP, Printing for GIMP, Print Photos GIMP, Scale Images, Image Resolution, GIMP 2.10.8, printing digital photos

Id: 8UqhI_dtKBc

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 30 2019