Intro to Fine Art Digital Printing

well Thank You Shelly for the introduction and thank you to being H for this opportunity ever since I started my career path as a photographer about eight years ago I was always a printer what I mean by that is that I always wanted to print for some of the reasons that Debra mentioned I like the idea of having a final product and that I think stems partly from my career as a music arranger and producer which is what I did before I became a photographer and as a producer I wasn't done until I had a finished product that I could share with others and so you know you could record and mix in the studio but it wasn't until you had the CD or the record of the LP or the cassette what-have-you that was your finished piece by which you were judged and others judged you by and you could really present your work without it being altered in any way and I feel the same way about printing so right from the beginning I wanted to print and also as a landscape photographer of course we we all kind of gravitate towards photographers that we admire and Ansel being one of those for me obviously one of his great assets was being a great printer so I knew that's what I wanted to do and I and printing a sort of affects and motivates and inspires me in the field because when I'm even when I'm composing an image in the field and setting it up I'm thinking about what the final print is going to be and look like which gets to another point that I want to bring across which is this idea that I don't particularly like the term post-processing very much because it sort of separates the the capture and the print to separate sort of creative mindsets and they're not they're one in the same so when you're composing your image when you're making image if you're thinking about the print then it should be one thing when you get back into Lightroom or Photoshop you're continuing along with the same mindset the same sort of creative vision that you had when you were shooting whereas a lot of people I think now shoot and then it's like phase two and now they're in the computer trying to decide what they're going to do but they forgot about what inspired them to begin with and I think when you take the approach of continuation then you have a much clearer vision and a much clearer sort of workflow about what you're going to do when you get the image into Lightroom or Photoshop and you get lost in all of the controls that were also familiar with right so printing digital printing today can be a very technically heavy confusing jargon Laden sort of thing with so many different options I'm going to try in an hour and a half to basically distill it to the basic elements and make it as simple as possible my whole approach is make things as simple as possible they don't need to be any more than that there's going to be a lot of information but I feel it's information that will be relevant to printing so a lot of the terms you will see them come up there's a lot more to it of course and I'm going to leave those for when you want to explore it further or taking a longer workshop I teach Oh two-day workshop on printing which gets into a lot of more these things in depth but I think this should give you a good introduction and give you a feel for printing is there anyone want the know the term gee clay means or Z clay as some pronounce it so G clay the G clay is it's it's a name that was actually coined by Jack do gain of Nash editions back in the 90s as a way of sort of separating inkjet prints which at the time were low quality from prints that were made on an iris printer and this printer was the first sort of archival machine that could make archival prints the original ones were about a hundred and twenty-five grand I think they are now based in Massachusetts but anytime someone says is that a giclee print if you're using one of the now common printers that can make archival prints and those are predominately made by either Epson Canon or HP then you're in effect producing a giclee print of course now the term that should be used and is used in galleries and exhibitions and so forth is an archival pigment print archival because of the fact that it has archival properties if you use the right the right paper and the right inks and then pigment because that's the ink that's being used to make the image now why would you want to print or reproduce for that matter a lot of times when I give these talks that are not just photographers but they're also fine artists that are thinking about printing their work meaning to have an original painting and then they want to make a scan and then print it so that they can make copy so one reason would be if you wanted to sort of leverage your one original and make copies in different sizes for a photographer that would be because you want to have more creative control you want to be able to be to experiment more you want to have a little more of a say in what this final piece looks like printing is not for everyone there's no question about that printing can be inexpensive sort of as I mentioned before sort of confusing a road to go down and for some I recommend maybe you shouldn't print on your own if you're a wedding photographer or someone who needs to generate lots and lots of prints and you're not making museum quality or archival prints maybe it might be better to outsource it and you can really focus on running your business but as I said for me as a fine art photographer I think the printing process is an integral part of who of who I'm trying to be and what I'm trying to create so I mentioned before if you want to take an original make copies if you're doing your own work it gives you the ability to experiment try different sizes see how different sizes affect a print and that's a lot cheaper if you have your own equipment versus sourcing it out this example here is just an image that one of my images were printing in a two different size it creates a totally different feel and look in the equipment in the print and of course you'd have to experience it in person to actually get the effect but but that's the idea this is my print studio in beacon New York and I want to take a moment to I want to take a moment to to thank Dale a good friend of mine who actually lives like down the block for me so thanks Dale for coming down but yeah this is my space in beacon custom-built to not only print but also to mat and frame and I also teach workshops there and I'm basically using this is an 8100 but I now have a Canon 8400 this printer has been retired on the right that's a Canon 5000 and then I have an Epson in that picture it's an Epson 2400 but currently it's an Epson 38 80 so I have Canon an Epson I use them both I like them both and I use them for different reasons so I don't particularly have an allegiance to one or the other but I do prefer them yeah I'll get to that a little later in the presentation the other thing I want to mention real quick is that I will stop at certain periods to take questions from anyone who has any questions so this way we can sort of get a flow but I will talk about that so that's a good good question all right so making a print starts way before you even see a printer or paper or even your computer it starts in the camera and actually you could say it even starts in your mind in your vision I mean it this it's it's really the process of making a good photograph but there are certain ingredients certain critical technical elements that go into making a good print first is having proper camera technique if we're talking about landscapes in nature predominately you want to have a really good focused sharp image that's going to be using a tripod using mirror lock-up okay you're using optimal aperture so you want to make sure that your camera is as steady as possible without any shaking and whatnot because when you print large all those little deficiencies will be much will be magnified you want to use you want to make sure you're capturing your images in an optimal fashion as optimal as possible you want to shoot raw not in JPEG because when you should raw you're you're basically retaining all the information that the camera sensor captures JPEG throws out a bunch of information whether it's a bit depth or color compression etc so your best negative is going to be your raw file again proper exposure for any of those that have heard the term exposing to the right that's crucial especially when it comes to reducing noise in the shadows so you want to try to bias your histogram to the right that's one of those things where if you're not sure what I'm talking about do a google search and you'll find lots of information on that low ISO s mean less noise of course even with today's cameras I say unless you know very well how much noise your eyes those are going to give you try to go as low as possible I use a five year old digital camera so I'm always at iso 100 maybe 200 at most for most of the images that I make you want it to be sharp of course and then of course once we have a good capture not talking necessarily about composition but technically getting the best file from your camera then you want to make sure that you're going to process it optimally in your raw developer of choice so that means you're going to maximize your tonal values you're going to make sure you set a black point and a white point you're going to sharpen properly so in general the the sort of the the mindset or the the workflow is you want to sharpen twice you're going to sharpen what's called capture sharpening which basically compensates for any loss of sharpening in camera most cameras have anti-aliasing filters you can get a Nikon d800e that does not have that filter on it but most cameras do have that filter so capture sharpening meaning applying a little sharpening when you bring it into Lightroom will eliminate that if those of you use Lightroom you notice that even by default the sharpening is set at 25 like as soon as you bring a picture without doing anything and that 25 the amount is just to make up for that and then there is print sharpening which is a second step at the very minimum and print sharpening helps with compensating for the type of paper you're going to use okay some papers are sharper than others it compensates for how big you're going to print it etc so those two areas are the ones where you really want to focus in on getting the proper sharpening there are other types of sharpening you can do like you know a creative sharpening where you want to sharpen just a part of the image that's not necessarily a part of making sure you get a good picture or good print I should say and then finally is paper selection that's the last piece of this puzzle and of course we all know that papers are you know very multi very to the point where it's hard to keep track of what company has what I pretty much use cans on papers exclusively and I'm familiar with all their papers and even even saying that I don't use all other papers I've pretty much settled on four or five that I'd like to use out mention those later but knowing the paper is just like knowing your lenses or knowing your camera's key if you shoot with too many different lenses then you saw lose track of what lenses are good at what and it's better to kind of know the tool really well and I see paper I look at paper it's just another tool and I get familiar with what it does to an image what it does to a print and then I use the correct paper so choosing the right papers in point as well so let's talk about basic equipment and software that you would need to sort of start down this road of printing there's as I mentioned before there's four parts there's the capture the process then there's soft proofing and then there's the printing and after the printing of course would be the presentation how you're going to display your print if anyone wants to scan negatives or you know they want to print stuff that isn't already in digital format the Epson visa 750 or even there's a new one out the V 700 those are pretty much a standard scanners now outside of getting something like a drum scanner that's going to be a lot more expensive but especially if you want to scan negatives that would be a way to go so if you're trying to digitize your negatives or your or your film otherwise we're all starting with digital cameras so we're already in the digital domain my strong opinion and also of many others that are that I consider experts in the field is that Lightroom Lightroom and we're version 4 now going on version 5 pretty soon especially when it comes to printing is probably the best piece of software that you're going to find especially when it comes to printing because it has certain features that are really hard to find in any other piece of software for printing not to mention the cataloguing feature is not to mention the developing in Lightroom not to mention that you're staying assuming you don't go out and convert a file to photoshop you're staying completely in the in the raw environment and you print from the RAW files so that really is going to give you the your best you know your best original print without any sort of pixel manipulation that does happen when you go out to photoshop how many of you using Lightroom here okay so I'm preaching to the choir the other aspect also that's critical is to profile your pops or calibrate your monitor okay that's really important and also proof you can create custom profiles if you would like at the very minimum that you need to calibrate your monitor that basically brings your monitor up to a standard of a color and black and white make sure that it's not giving you false colors that it's white it's true white black is true black and there isn't any kind of a bias towards red or green or what-have-you some of the popular ones X right makes a really good calibrator vx1 I also have a I believe it's called the spider 4 which is another good calibrator so those two devices are going to be great if you want to get into creating your own paper profiles which I'll speak of later one way to get into that is using the color monkey which is a cheaper more affordable let me say that way paper profiler I would though suggest that you always try at least from the kit from canned signs one of you I cannot speak to other manufacturers but from canned signs point of view I know the guy in France who makes the can sign profiles personally and I know that they do not use a color monkey they use a twenty five hundred dollar spectrophotometer which is automated and whatnot so they're making really really high quality profiles a lot better than you're going to be able to get with this and so you're at the least you should try now I make my own profiles which a better device and I still use some of their generic or kin profiles because they work really well okay so I'll speak about what the profiles aren't how to use them but point is before you rush out to buy any by at least a paper profile or try the ones that you can download for free from cans ons website and you would need one for every paper that you want to use so again using accurate ICC profiles that's what I just talked about an ICC profile is basically a file that contains data that allows you to translate between one device and another so the way you can think of it is as if each device in your workflow uses kind of a different language like the camera speaks one language the computer speaks a different language and the printer speaks a different language when it comes to color so in other words red the way red is described in one device is different than the way it's described in another device even though it's the same color visually they use different ways of describing that and the profiles translate between the devices so if you're using the proper profiles then it means that the red that you see that the red that the camera captures is the red that you're going to print out if you have a mismatch of profiles or don't use profiles then there's no guarantee that that would be the case and it probably won't be the case so the red that you see on your screen or that you saw and the camera captured will look totally different so profiles are critical now the only profiles that we need to really concern ourselves with in printing are the paper profiles because Lightroom does a great job of providing all of the profiles for most camera manufacturers so that's built-in okay so when you import an image it reads the raw file it from the metadata it takes the name of the camera the body the serial number and then it uses the correct profile in Lightroom that's why whenever Lightroom puts out an update one of the things they're updating is new profiles for new cameras that have come on the market same thing with your monitor you need to create a profile for your monitor that's where you use the x1 or the spider for that reads your monitor and then it creates a profile that corrects your monitor for any color deficiency so this way you're getting the right color and then we need a profile for the paper that you're going to bring down okay so printers basically as I mentioned at the beginning there are three manufacturers there's Epson Canon and HP and more or less it's the consensus that Epson and Canon are the ones that are sort of pushing the bar forward HP is kind of like behind a bit in terms of what they're doing so what I mean by that is whether it's new ink formulations or new features new models they're all all three are great but Epson and Canon seem to be in terms of market share and in the industry tend to be a little more credible absent for a long time used to be the most in terms of in the fine art market because they they were around longer and I think people trusted them Canon seems to be closing that gap very quickly if they haven't closed it already all three use pigmenting inks they all three are rated archival inks by Walheim research I'll mention one research more in depth in a minute they all have excellent color gamut so color gamut basically describes how many colors a device can reproduce so they have a very wide color gamut meaning as wide as you can get on any printer that's important so you get all the colors from your pictures all of them you also use several tints of black for black and white so it's not just black but they usually have black light black light light black so that allows you to get much better gradation in tonalities and black and white prints differences though are a the one of the most important ones is that Epson uses piezo head technology and canons use thermal head technology from a standpoint of quality there's no difference but there is a difference in terms of whether they can be serviced and how they clog or lack of clogging and whether you can fix them or not so piezo heads which are in Epson printers cannot be replaced once the piezo head goes on your Epson the whole printer has to be replaced but they do tend to last a little longer thermo heads which are used in Canon printers can be replaced so in other words if your head goes bad you can buy a new ink printhead and put it in and you can keep using your printer but that's not a cheap proposition either but you don't have to throw the whole printer away the other thing is that in general what I've read is that if you're doing a lot of printing daily meaning like you're let's say you're a printing house or you're regularly printing the piezo heads tend to be a better tend to perform better because they Epson printers like the clock some of the more recent ones don't as much but they still have a clog in problem because of the technology and if you using it everyday then that's likely not to happen whereas the canons because of the heads are better I think for people that don't print everyday and maybe you want to print a bunch and then you want to let it sit for a couple of days or a week and then you can go back to it and print again so there's a general guideline doesn't mean that problems are not the same on both platforms but those are some general guidelines I have both printers as I mentioned before I use them both fairly often but I've also let them sit for awhile I've replaced on my 8100 which I showed in the picture but I don't I still have it but it's not my main printer I replaced the heads twice there's two print heads so I replaced both print heads after about a year and a half something like that Canon yeah but I was able to keep using the you know printer not have to worry about it the I had an Epson 2400 that just got to the point where it was so clogged I just had to get a new one the reason I have both is because I like printing on both for different reasons the Epson is great for doing bleeds and for doing smaller work it also prints note cards and that 8400 or 8100 I use with rolls so I don't like to swap papers around it just takes too long so I keep rolls loaded in the big printer all the time and I do cut sheet in general on the on the Epson unless of course I run out of ink on the Epson and then I have to go to the to the to the Canon question was how much do I print I mean I print from myself I print for a few other artists that I know or live in my town or what-have-you and I also print what I'm doing demonstrations and print when I'm doing exhibitions that kind of thing so I mean I don't know if it's hard to qualify what a lot is but I don't print once every three months I use the printer pretty often and a lot of times I make prints on my own when I first started the way I learned how to print his wife this is probably not a great environmental thing but I learned how to print by filling garbage cans of bad prints because they didn't work and you would you would keep practicing until you got it right kind of like filling up your car drive with bad images which I do that too so so as I mentioned I have an 8400 and the 3880 both excellent printers I can't recommend one over the other but I can't say that both are I recommend both they're both great manufacturers and the last thing I mentioned in this what you need is of course paper and as I mentioned before I am fond of cans on paper they come in many many different textures and finishes and I'll talk about some of them and why you would use them and while how you would choose one over the other all right the other next thing I want to talk about is what's called print permanence which is another thing that should be important to anybody printing print permanence basically defines how archival or print is how long it's going to last whether it's going to fade and this is important first of all for yourself if you printing for yourself and you want the prints to last just for whatever you want to hand them off to your your kids or what have you want them to stick around for a while or especially if you're selling your work or exhibiting your work and you're selling to a buyer you want to be able to guarantee to them that this print is going to last that the money that they're paying is for something that's archival nature museum grade museum quality as a side note most of the work that I print out I try to sell and so it's important for me to use materials that I can I feel confident about and that I can feel justified in telling the customer hey this is our Cavill material archival paper here the research this is reputable company and so that's why it's important for me to use good material so print permanence there are three things that determine print permanence one again is the paper the second thing is the inks that you use so it's not just a paper it's a combination of the paper and the ink and then the last thing that determines permanence is environmental factors where the print is displayed where it's stored etc ozone is one of the key things that is detrimental to prints that's why for instance if you put a print on your refrigerator door not necessarily an archival one but one out of a cheap office printer within four or five months it turns yellow even if it's out of the Sun why because all refrigerators admit ozone and the ozone creeps up the side of the refrigerator and affects the print it might be low amounts but enough to cause damage to the print so ozone is critical and then there are some other critical components to permanence so one is obas or what are called optical brightening agents other times called fluorescence obas which you'll hear in the paper industry are chemicals that are added to paper and basically these chemicals absorb ultraviolet light which they get from the Sun and they emit blue light meaning that what in effect what happens is that the paper appears to be whiter than it really is and by making a paper whiter in effect we're increasing contrast a bit because contrast is just the difference between white and black right so you want to make sure you don't use obas because obh do have a tendency to fade over time now other manufacturers that use obeys Canon Sun does not use any obeys whatsoever in their papers some other manufacturers that use them will say that the OBS fade evenly so well I'm sorry that they even if they fade that when they have faded you'll have the print that you would have started with if you didn't use opiates the only problem with that is I think that they may not fade evenly so if the obas do not fade evenly then you wind up with a print that is darker or bright in one area the other okay so that's why it's important not to have OB A's one test of OBS you'll see at some shows manufacturers will have an ultraviolet light and if you pass the light over a print and it reflects back then it has OB A's in it so that's one critical component another one is again the inks must be archival protecting the print from UV rays from the Sun that's another thing that hurts print permanent so you want to use glass that has a UV rating on it UV glass doesn't have to be museum glass or anti reflective glass but it needs to be UV glass low temperatures if you're storing your prints anywhere you should keep them lower than warmer and drier versus more humid so kind of like the conditions that we as humans like not too hot not too humid and then as I mentioned before protection from ozone and usually that happens either when you put it behind ass or some other protection so the way to do that is to frame using glass or acrylic okay as long as your biker like that is UV or glass you're good you can if you don't like glass and you want to just have the print without anything over it you can buy some sprays that you can spray the print one the one that I've used in the past is called print shield I think the name of the company might be print shield I'm sure they have it here somewhere and if you spray the print with that then you can display the print without any glass coating at all protection I don't do that basically because it's it's extra work and it also doesn't smell very good and it also adds a tiny bit of contrast to the image because you're adding a sort of coating on it but for anyone who wants to try that I've tried it it might work you want to reduce UV light you can also laminate okay and again you want to store in ideal temperatures now I mention whoa home research before what home research is a sort of an independent company started by warm research and basically what they do is they rate and test all papers by all manufacturers with all the inks that are available today and they test them for longitude ysou they'll they'll make prints using all the different papers and printers then they'll put them through these accelerated tests of heat Nuvi and whatnot and then they'll come out with these reports that you can get on their website for free so i'm showing you a report here that was put out four cans on infinity papers and i highlighted in yellow one of my favorite papers the rag photographic and so you can see they tell you displayed under glass the bare rating the permanence at one hundred and eight years if you display it with a UV filter so with UV glass because the glass alone just protects from ozone but if you use a UV glass it's rated up to one hundred and nine to nine years and then so on and so forth so displayed prints with nothing just bare it's 56 years you can see from you can go from 56 years to 200 years with by using UV glass and then they have some other conditions here that you can check that so these are all available on at the website is Walheim research their website is in need of a major upgrade because it's very difficult to to sort of browse through it so the easiest way is to just type in at the top what you're looking for so if you're looking for Epson type in Epson if you're looking for Hannam you'll type in how you're looking for cans on type and cans on and you get all the reports for that paper in that printer if you're going to not print for a week or two or three weeks when I travel I link the printer on and at least on the can't on the can and it goes through a purging process every week and a half or two and it doesn't use a lot of ink but it just kind of keeps it maintained now both Epson and Canon have in their manuals a procedure by which you can sort of like turn the printer off and put it into storage or whatever if you're not going to be using it for a while so yeah so you can you can do that the other thing I will mention also that I has to do with canon an Epson is my experience has been that the canons tend to be a little more efficient with ink usage it could also be because my app Canon is bigger and so the ink cartridges are bigger and in general like everything else when you buy in bulk it's cheaper so the reason why you get these little office printers for free is because it is free it's the ink where they make the money and they charge you a ton for the little cartridges whereas the Canon it comes with big 700 millimeter cartridges they're about 200 bucks each but I can go a year without replacing the cartridges and that set of thousands of prints so you know your mileage may vary depending on what kind of printing you're doing alright so let's get into some paper basics papers are at least inkjet papers are composed of two layers there's what's called the base or the substrate and then there's the coating on top without the coating it really won't work in an inkjet printer the coating is what allows the inks that come out of the heads to retain and dry and give you the sharpness and accuracy that you need for an inkjet printer for an inkjet print without that coating like regular office paper don't get that and if anyone's ever tried to print color on their office printer you can tell them cheap paper that it just runs and gets very just doesn't look very good at all so those are the two components there's the substrate and there is the coating and as a side note I will tell you that cans on infinity has only been making inkjet papers about five years that's kind of how long they've been doing this however they've been making paper the base the substrate for 500 years and all they did was they took the same substrate that they've been making and then they added a coating on top of it that would work in an inkjet printer so you're getting the same consistent time time tested paper that has been used for hundreds of years by thousands of really well-known artists but they're putting a coating on it just so that we as photographers can take advantage of that paper and I like that idea that it's the same paper coming off the mill making it from scratch that guarantees you're going to have the same quality regardless of whether you buy ten boxes or 100 boxes or you buy one box today and another box a year from now so just in terms of paper making that's I think good to know now there's two types of of a base that you can have you can have one made of cotton rag or one made of what's called alpha cellulose the cotton rag is going to be a little more expensive it has a great feel because it feels like a nice cotton based paper and it's going to probably give you the longest longitude the other type of base that you'll see is what's called alpha cellulose which is made from wood fibers still good with longitude but it's a little cheaper to make and for me it doesn't have the same feel and I have both examples up here so you guys can check it out later but in terms of longitude I and archival and permanence they're pretty much the same but you'll see those two things so you'll go to buy paper it'll say cotton rag or it'll say alpha cellulose or won't say anything typically if you don't see that it says cotton rag it's probably made of alpha cellulose and then on top of that as I mentioned there's a coating and there's two basic types of coating there's a micro porous coating and an RC coating otherwise known as a red photo paper or a resin coated paper in the on the RC paper sent to be the ones I feel kind of plastic II sort of don't feel like nice archival paper the micropores papers definitely have more of a of an art art type field and finish to them now there's several finishes within those coatings and bases there's a matte paper right that's going to be the paper that gives you the least amount of reflection very flat okay and it's going to have a varying amount of texture depending on what kind of texture you get and some people like a very heavy texture or tooth as it's called meaning that it's got a nice grain to it and there are others that can be very very very smooth depending on what you're going for matte papers tend to have less d-max than fiber or glass papers d max d max is a term that out I'm going to use more as we go along but D max basically is a measurement of how much black a paper can hold so in other words the more black you can print onto a paper the higher the D max and the reason why that's important is because the more D max then the more contrast we get and also the better separation of Shadows we can achieve because we have more black more depth to work with in terms of black if you make an image and you print it on a matte paper and then print the same image on a fiber based or a glass based paper assuming that the image has a lot of blacks and shadows in it you'll notice that there's more separation in the shadows on the fiber and gloss based paper and that's just a function of the the paper and that's something that you should take into account aesthetically and creatively in my opinion don't just discount the matte paper because it has low D max you can use that to your advantage if you want an image that isn't as deep or as moody or as as as in-your-face so matte paper tend to be more painterly and gloss papers tend to be very you know very loud as it were you know so so that's something you should be aware of from a creative standpoint and not just necessarily from the limitations of the paper I'll get to that so then from Matt then we go to semi-gloss or sometimes referred to as lustre or satin and these papers again are in between sort of RC gloss paper and a matte paper and again they tend to have better d-max and better sharpness because you're dealing with a much smoother sharper surface than a matte paper then there's this other category that has become very popular over the last couple years which is sometimes called f-type or fiber based paper and these papers are trying to emulate or simulate a traditional darkroom prints silver based prints of fire based prints and they are really really good these are the papers that I'd like to use the most so in Cannes on that would be the brighter the Platini they have a fiber based finish very smooth very rich not glass not matte a lot of d-max a lot of detail but still not sort of in-your-face like a gloss paper would be and they also are available with a cotton backing which is nice because then it gives it a very very nice feel even though you have this sort of luster finish on the front of it okay and then finally we have the glossy paper and also people that love gloss paper I'm not a big fan of gloss for myself but if it works for your work then that's great and that's going to give you a lot of reflection a lot of glare now I will say that it doesn't come down so much it to the field if you're framing behind glass because once you put it behind glass then no one can really touch it and feel it so a lot of times for me I might choose a paper based on what I'm going to do with it if it's a part of my portfolio that I'm going to hand to someone and they're going to touch it then I might want to print on a nice matte paper that feels great to the touch or making a folio which I'll show in a minute if it's going to go behind glass then you can relate that touch aspect out of it and just think about how it looks aesthetically and also glass has it turned amount of reflection to it so matte paper behind glass is still going to get some reflection so the reflectivity also becomes a little ambiguous once you go behind glass so now these are some popular papers of Kansans that I like and the bars kind of illustrate the finishes so everything in the kind of the yellow range is going to be your matte papers with varying amounts of texture from the aquarelle all the way to the photographic down here on the Left which is probably which is their smoothest paper and the highest d-max of probably all of their matte papers then in the fire base finish they only have to the Platini rag and the brighter the difference really is that the Platini is 100% cotton backing the brighter is not it's more of a cellulose paper with a brighter finish and the brightest as smooth as you can get there is no texture whatsoever whereas the Platina has a little texture to it which I like I like both and then the premium glass which is on our sea paper there are more papers and kansans line but if you wanted to sort of break it down into sort of an overall over look on the papers that are available these are the ones for instance if you're coming from let's say Hannam you photo rag which I use for many years and is very popular the addition edging would probably be closest to a hon mu photo rag except without the Oba so there isn't a white edition etching like there is a white photo rag and the white photo rag is just the photo right that has OB A's in it now from my personal work and the papers that I sort of gravitate to and I use constantly again part of it is just so that I become familiar with them as a tool as I mentioned in the mat in them in the matte papers I like the rag photographic and the addition edging I almost always use 300 white papers these papers come in different weights not necessarily the thickness but the the weight of the paper in terms of how hefty it feels in your hands and I almost always use a 300 range because they lay flat they tend not to curl on you they feel really nice when you hand it to someone and they come in rolls and cut sheets so the right photograph ego the dish and etching depending on whether you want a tooth or some texture and then on the fiber side I like the platino fiber rag if I'm looking for something that has a little texture to it and then I use the brighter if I don't want texture or if it's a black-and-white image I tend to gravitate towards the brighter because the for black and white I think it works really well it holds shadow detail really well it's really sharp it looks good when you tone it so I like to tone my images in Lightroom from time to time black and white images and so the toning works really well I think just means I tend to use that one more of the two these are the ones that I tend to use more of basically on the fiber side I use more the Platina because I tend to make and print a color images more than I do black and white images if I was let's say black why photographer that might be reversed who knows but having said that I have I have printed black and white on the matte papers and I have printed color you know so I there's I've used I've interchange them and use them in different ways in shapes for example I'll give you an example the fiber papers tend to be very Conte they can be contrasting in a good way they have a lot of d-max they're very sharp but when I went to print a black-and-white image of my three-month-old daughter I didn't want that sort of in your face look I wanted something a little more romantic looking and when I printed it on the right photographic of the addition etching I got more the look that I wanted I wasn't interested in this ultra D max I was interested in as something that was a little softer and softer I'm using that sort of in a very visual aesthetic kind of way okay so that could be the case there are some images that I have that are color that I want to appear to be a little more painterly or more romantic if you will and using that terminology so I might go to a matte paper for an image like that so it depends on the properties of the paper what they do to the image and what your ultimate result what you're looking to achieve with the print what you want to convey what you want it to say how you want other people to kind of perceive that image and they'll perceive it differently depending on what paper you print on no question about it so other basic oh yeah well not all no they some of them have especially in the mat ranges some of them will be warmer than others and that's just the way that papers produce and that also takes in effect depending on how warm you want the paper to be so definitely that's something you want to you know experiment with when you're printing in color I would I would argue that the warmness of the brightness of the paper doesn't really play a factor like I have done many of these presentations where I'll show someone a paper and they'll think that it's as white as can be until I show another paper next to it and then they realize it's not as white as can be there's a wider paper so brightness tends to be very relative and if you have a print that you frame and you hang it in a space and there's no other prints around that you're comparing then that's going to be your white point that's going to be your reference so again don't choose it based on you know measurements about how wide a paper is choose it because you think that it makes your work or your print look its best and convey that to whoever's you know you're looking at it or using it or you're selling it or what have you okay another one I haven't mentioned is canvas canvas is pretty popular these days for a multitude of reasons can Sun also makes a couple of canvas lines it's probably more cost-effective because you're not dealing with glass and framing and whatnot there's no glare that's a big positive because you you can hang it without glass in front of it you do have to coat it which is a separate process for UV but there's no glare that's nice especially when you don't have optimal lighting which is pretty rare unless you're in a museum or something like that and it has a contemporary look it's popular so that's another thing you can do as well with if you're doing your printing from the standpoint of what we're talking about here in terms of workflow it does no dermatome whether you're printing on canvas or on paper you just you know you just approach it the same way okay and canvas will have a different effect on an image and you'll have to take that into consideration there are certain images I don't like the way they look in canvas others look really well that's just going to be experimentation on your part now a couple of examples I'm just going to run through some quick examples of stuff that I've done so that to basically highlight the idea that by think myself in my own space I'm able to do some things creatively that would be much more difficult to do if I was outsourcing so this is a canvas print that's framed inside of a floater a wooden floater which makes it just gives it more of a finished look some people don't like the edges on the outside of their canvas so you can put it inside of a frame like this this is another canvas that's made into a triptych so it's divided into three right that's another idea this is actually a mural a wall mural that's hung in a popular coffee shop for me in town that I display my prints regularly and this is printed in strips so this is made of three strips that I printed on my Canon and then you you know you combine them on the wall it's kind of like a wallpaper okay this is a folio that I mentioned before so this is basically something I made myself printed on eight and a half by eleven that's the outside with the cover and then when you open it up it's a series of ten prints with some description and introduction and whatnot and this is something that I can do all myself and experiment with it and see what works what doesn't work explain with sizes playing with paper textures this folio is how I ultimately be got fortunate enough to be associated with cans on because I was carrying this thing with me all the time and I still carry with me and so I would always make it a point to show it to people and get their their their their feedback and I happened to be at a show where Canson was I believe it was photo plus cans on was had a booth there and I happen to have this folio printed on guess what cans on paper I had never really met them at a show before but my dealer had turned me on to cans on and so I tried it and I loved it and I started printing with and say hey you know what maybe you guys want to check the suckers I just printed this folder in your paper and then while we like that and cetera so that speaks to having prints in my opinion there's no doubt that this was a lot more effective than pulling out an iPad or an iPhone I have both I love them both but there's nothing that compares to the feel and and not only the feel but the dedication in artistry that is required when you show somebody a selection of prints it's a lot harder to do that then just pull up an iPad with and just you know and also it demands attention when you give somebody ten prints it demands that they look at each print versus an iPad it's just very easy to scroll through it again I'm not saying that there is there aren't uses and applications for iPads but I'm finding more and more now that photographers are kind of gravitating more towards something that is more text you know has a feel to it an aesthetic appeal that is not just electronic so and then finally no cards I also do know cards I use Museo paper for this because they happen to make just a really nice paper that fits into an inkjet printer which got the fold in it already and you can buy these in store too so these are made by musee I think you get them in what is it a seven size I believe it is or forget now and then you fold them in half alright so let's move on now to color management and this is another area that can get kind of tricky so I'm just going to hit on important highlights that again are critical to making sure that your workflow is efficient and accurate so what do I mean by workflow we mean basically again getting from what the camera captures to a final print without changes in color without any hookups without without any anything that's going to get in the way of making sure that your color remains accurate from beginning to end now there are two color models that you will run across when you're using Photoshop especially they are the RGB color model and the CMYK color model that's basically a way of describing colors in a very basic term and RGB is what's called a additive color model means that colors are added together to create other colors whereas the CMYK is a subtractive color model what you need to know is that for the most part RGB is used everywhere except when it comes to offset printing so if you're doing any printing in magazines or in newspapers or anything else that's offset printed meaning not on an inkjet printer it's probably going to use a CMYK color model the good news is that you cannot use the CMYK model in Lightroom some people don't like that but there's no way that you see my can enlighten which is a good thing this way you know get confused about that however if you are sending out your work to be printed and it's going to be offset printed it needs to be converted to CMYK which is something you can do in Photoshop if you're not if you're not sure about that don't don't even worry about it but if you ever come across or you have to make a choice and you're printing to inkjet make sure you always stay in the RGB color model and that again that would only probably be a hiccup in Photoshop because the color settings can be a little confusing I'll show what the window looks like but that's important to know the second concept to be aware of is what's called color spaces now there are a couple ways to sort of think about this I've heard different ways of describing it some people think of bottles some people think of balloons I've used this crayon sort of analogy or metaphor whatever you want to call it but basically a color space defines how many colors are available to work with so a small crayon box would be a small color space because you only have let's say 16 crayons right and a large color space would be the biggest crayon box and you would have more colors to work with okay so there are basically three that are used regularly there's what's called the sRGB color space which is the smallest color space there's the Adobe ninety-eight color space which is bigger and then there's the prophoto RGB color space which is the biggest now even with the biggest color space which is prophoto RGB it's still not quite big enough to capture all the colors that are captured by a digital sensor but it's the biggest one that's available today okay so what that means is that if you use the prophoto RGB color space you are basically capturing all the colors that come off of your camera of your of your digital sensor now I'm just going to do a little tangent here just to cover all the bases if you're shooting in RAW right the setting on your camera that chooses between srgb or Adobe 98 is irrelevant because you're shooting in RAW if you shoot in JPEG first of all you're throwing colors away automatically because you're compressing from a from the raw file to JPEG plus you can choose between srgb and 98 and if you have it set to srgb that means that as soon as you press that shutter those millions of colors get compressed down to thousands right off the bat okay so again that's what you want to stay in raw and if you stay in raw you don't have to worry about the color space setting that is on the back of most digital cameras now if you're importing into Lightroom Lightroom uses a prophoto RGB like color space it is an exactly prophoto RGB but it's just as big and there's no nothing to change your set there so you're good to go now there has been a lot you read arguments online for and against using different color spaces right some people say well a lot of the colors in profology you can't even see their other they're outside of the visual spectrum so why use up extra bandwidth or extra memory or what have you if those colors can't be seen and my argument has been from an archival standpoint being a photographer that wants to generate and capture the best files that I can I don't see the downside to capturing more and preserving more even if you're not going to use it for a while or even if you know you can't see it a technology is changing all the time and even though we can't see it now or can't use it now there may be a time when we can take advantage of those extra colors and white throw them away number two I don't think anybody's having an issue with harddrive space okay when I started in music years ago I paid $600 for like 500 gigs something alone I forgot the numbers but it's something ridiculous like that where you can get two terabytes now for 100 bucks so that's not an issue because the RGB the pro you know the Profoto should be tend to be bigger files and the other aspect is that when you are manipulating an image in Lightroom or Photoshop okay the extra colors allow you to get better results when you're going to extreme moves like if you're really saturating or desaturating colors having extra colors allows you to get a more accurate result versus starting with a small set of colors you can run into problems like banding or other artifacts so I always say start with the biggest preserve the biggest and then you can go from there but at least you have your original negative always preserved in Lightroom the only place that you ever deal with this issue of color spaces is if you want to export your image to process it in Photoshop okay so sometimes I will export an image from Lightroom to photoshop to do something that I can't do in Lightroom and then I bring it back into into Photoshop then I'll bring it back into Lightroom in the Preferences in Lightroom the main preferences the third tab is called external editing and you'll see that it allows you to choose how you want to render that image when you export it out to Photoshop now if you have this set to an sRGB color space or an Adobe 98 color space it means that you're not going to be clipping a lot of colors you'll never get those back unless you go back to the original raw file of course but if you go out to Photoshop and they continue to work with that Photoshop file you have in essence compressed and thrown away lots of colors so my point is make sure in Lightroom you set the color space to prophoto RGB when you want you know if you intend on exporting into Photoshop at some point there's also a setting for bit-depth which I'm going to cover next but you also have want to have the bit-depth set to 16 bits okay and that has to do with the same reasons I'm going to get a little more 2 bit depth in a minute but 16 bit depth is the only depth of bits that allows us to also preserve all of the colors in the prophoto RGB color space when you shoot JPEG not only does it compress the colors it also makes an 8-bit file and you've thrown away lots of tones and lots of colors and lots of nice gradations that you would normally get in a raw file alright in Photoshop the place where you would deal with that is in the color settings in Photoshop and you all you want to do is change where it says working spaces you want to change the RGB setting to say prophoto RGB normally it might by default when you install Photoshop it probably says srgb okay so if you open an image in Photoshop and you're not aware of these things Photoshop might if you don't have the warnings turned on it might just convert it to a smaller color spacing you won't even know about it and this has happened to me regularly when I have other artists send me work to print and then I open it up in Photoshop and I notice that it's an sRGB and I'm like well how come you send me an sRGB oh I didn't even know so we make the print but in effect we're using a much smaller set of colors than they probably had in their original file and this is the fact they've spent hours on and they don't want to go back and work with it alright this is sort of a visual representation of color spaces and so I've overlaid you see here overlaid different triangles and each triangle corresponds to a different color space so the the horseshoe shape on the outside it's it's basically all visible colors and then each of the triangles represents a different color space so you can see how the prophoto RGB colors the prophoto RGB triangle covers most of the visible colors all the way down to the srgb which is the very smallest and then 20200 map paper which is an Epson paper you can see the the color space of that paper those are the colors that that paper can represent now back to color spaces a minute you asked why when would I ever use srgb and that's a very very critical question the reason why we even have srgb and we haven't just gotten rid of it is because srgb has become the standard online so the internet basically runs on srgb all web browsers whether it's Firefox or Chrome or Safari only use the sRGB color space and that's why it's important because when we're putting stuff online you want to make sure that we're converting to srgb properly otherwise we run into that problem that we've all seen where the colors look completely disoriented or psychedelic or what have you things weird things happen if you take an image that's in a 98 or Profoto and just put it up online like that okay so that's why it's RGB is in porn again stay in prophoto RGB if you're going to go for if you're going to output to the web you want to convert to srgb you will have that option in Lightroom and if you're printing the dhobi 98 I don't mean this kind of printing but if you're sending out to be offset printed or you're sending it out to a lab or a house or anything like that then Adobe 98 is the color space you want to use bit-depth we've all heard about that right so bit-depth defines how many colors or gradations we have to work with when we go from black to white so for example if we had a two-bit image a bit can be there on or off so one bit gives you two values zero and one if we have a two bit image there's four values which means that and a two bit image hypothetically we would have four shades of gray black white and two shades in between and that would be the most that you would have in an image now if we we expand that out to 8-bit or 16-bit an 8-bit image which is all JPEG images only have 256 shades of gray or color to go from black to white that's it whereas if we go to a 16-bit image which I don't show up here but a 16-bit image gets us up to like 65,000 shades of gray or colours to go from black to white now what does that mean in in real world terms or in visual terms right it means that an 8-bit image depending on our colors and our gradations if you're trying to go from a 1 hue of blue to another hue of blue and you want it to be very smooth the 8-bit image is going to have an issue going from one hue blue to another whereas the 16-bit image is going to have more shades in between so it's going to be a much smoother looking image now there aren't any cameras I'm aware of that capture true 16-bit there may be phase one may have some cameras which are high-end digital cameras but all 35 millimeter digital cameras probably go up to fourteen bits at most but even at fourteen even at ten bits we're up to a thousand 24 off from 256 at fourteen bits it's something like four thousand okay so the point being the bigger your bit depth the better your gradations the better the transition from one color to another and that's why you always want to try to stay in 16 bits and in prophoto RGB as far as bit depth and your color space if you're shooting in RAW nothing to worry about unless you go out of lightroom to something like Photoshop or some other program now I'm not a hundred percent sure but I know that there are some plugins like the NIC plugins and the on one plugins allow you to export an image from Lightroom to the plug-in to do some manipulation then it brings it back into Lightroom and when you do that I'm almost sure I'm not a hundred percent sure of which one it is but they will give you a dialog that also asks you those same questions that I showed before about what bit-depth do you want and what color space do you want and again it's critical that you choose the right bit depth and color space otherwise without you knowing you may be compressing or changing your image in a way that is really unnecessary so make sure you always check that that it's if you're ever going out of Lightroom you're doing it in 16 bits and in prophoto RGB now here's an example of an image that is a 16-bit image and basically what I did is I use the levels the levels adjustment in Photoshop and I compressed the image so I move the black slider to middle gray I use the work I move the white slider to middle gray so I compressed all the tones and then after I apply that then I again expanded the black slider all the way to black and the white slider all the way to white and when we do that I wind up basically with an image that looked pretty much the same way did before I started this is a 16-bit image now I repeated the same process with an 8-bit image and all of you should be able to see the banding in the sky okay so by compressing and expanding and also you can see it in the histogram these spaces in between mean that there isn't any information in the file for me to display that part of the image and hence you have the bending and banding means that there isn't any colors to go in between one color to the next so it's just an example of you know just an example of bit-depth and how it actually looks visually sure that's the sixteen okay you can see it especially in the sky because sky is tend to have a lot of variance in blue and you want to have a lot of bit depth there and also in the water in the foreground but especially you can see it down on the lower left a lot and you can see it in the sky okay going up to the top noise no no it's this banding this is basically caused because I don't have enough i've manipulate the image of the point where there are enough colors to represent what i'm trying to when I'm what we're trying to display back to monitors for a second I didn't really talk too much about monitors but most monitors only display almost all of the sRGB color space there are some wide gamut monitors like for example the NEC monitors that I really like that are called I don't know the exact model but you they're called like NEC wide gamut monitors and basically what that is is a monitor that can display a bigger gamut of color almost approaching Adobe ninety-eight not quite auto b98 but it's like 95 percent somewhere along those lines what that means is that you're going to be able to see and edit and you know appreciate and work with more colors on your monitor than you will with a kind of a standard monitor now again back to the point again even if you can't see a lot of colors that are contained in the prophoto RGB it doesn't mean that they're not important or that they're not affecting your image so again I say work with the biggest space that you can work with your best raw materials and then as the tools catch up then you'll be in better shape to take advantage of those tools yeah so again I think in terms of archiving as much as I can with the idea that we can take advantage of it later now another thing you're going to see is something called rendering intent and you'll see that in Photoshop and in Lightroom whenever whenever you take an image out of Lightroom for whatever reason whether it's for printing or for exporting it for the web or creating a JPEG etc you're going to see a choice to pick a rendering intent and what a rendering intent is there's two methods it's basically two methods of taking a larger color space and compressing it down to a smaller one because that's what you want to do now you want to compress it to a smaller one because you're going to a new format that requires a smaller space in general they do this two different ways the perceptual color space compresses colors that are outside to be inside but keeps the colors that are inside basically the same whereas the relative moves them all relative so the colors that are outside move in but the colors that are in also get moved closer together the general idea is that you're going to choose these based on two things a if you're printing cans on will tell you they'll specify which rendering intent you should use with the profile that they're providing because that's the random intent of you so most of the time they're going to tell you to use perceptual for the most part so if the profile says this profile is for photographic use the perceptual rendering intent that's what you've got to choose when you're light when you're getting ready to print the other way to do it is by visually looking at both intents and seeing which one looks better I mean I know that's sort of a non-technical sort of way but that's really the nuts and bolts of it and you can only do that when you have soft proofing which is one of the things that Lightroom added in version 4 that's one of the critical things because you can then in Lightroom you can see how the rendering intensive visually we make an image look and they do have a different kind of look to the image and I just choose the one that looks best to me best means the one that looks closer to my original okay when you're outputting for the web you can solve proof is one in Lightroom but in general again I think the people that I've talked to and I've asked perceptual product tends to be the one that you use 60 to 70 percent of the time and relative maybe 30 40 percent of the time ok so just be aware of what that is and if you're not sure stick with perceptual but you'll have to make that choice at some point when you're printing or exporting in Lightroom alright so now we're onto one of my favorite topics which is resolution because there are about as many definitions of resolution as as who knows papers now one common miss not one but one I think probably the biggest fallacy about resolution is that dpi and PPI are the same and they are not technically PPI stands for pixels per inch okay and the important thing to remember about this is we're talking about the source of the information that we're dealing with so by source I mean pixels per inch means the source is a pixel is the information that's recorded by your camera sensor dpi however stands for a dot as in dots per inch and cameras do not make dots printers make dots okay so PPI dpi are two distinct definitions however the confusion comes in to the fact that they are used interchangeably by many people including myself and we use them interchangeably only with sort of the the assumption that depending on which context you use it in then people know what you're talking about so if I were to say the image in Photoshop is 300 dpi you sort of know that we're talking about pixels because I mentioned Photoshop in Photoshop is a pixel based tool whereas if I say I'm printing this at 300 PPI I really know that I'm talking about dots that's confusing but you see people interchange them all the time so what's the point is that PPI is pixels per inch dot two dots per inch and they are not the same a pixel is what's generated from your camera a dot is what is used by a printer to generate a print and a printer may use many dots to make one pixel okay so that's where the confusion is let's say I'm sending a 300 PPI image to my printer right but then you go into the printer settings and the printer says do you want to print that 400 dpi or 2800 DPI as Epsons do and you're like well how do I get from 300 to 1400 2800 well it's because it's basically the in Lightroom it's asking you how many pixels you want to represent in an inch and the printer is asking you how many dots you want to print on the page based on the capabilities of the printer okay if we're dealing with a pixel based based device such as a computer and iPad an iPhone a computer screen anything that is basically a display resolution is irrelevant okay I'll say that again if you're dealing with a pixel based display such as an iPad an iPhone a computer a TV set an LCD TV like this one over here okay resolution is irrelevant because resolution okay resolution is relevant when we're going from one type of display to another and this is not a computer screen this is a piece of paper and the technology used to make this print is different from the one used to make a display that's made of pixels this is made of dots so when you're exporting an image for a pixel-based display the only thing that matters is how many pixels that's it okay if I export something out of lightroom for facebook and i set the resolution to 300 or 72 or 280 or 500 or a thousand it makes no difference whatsoever because lightroom only takes that into effect if I specify the output size in inches but if I specify it in pixels it's going to give me pixels okay so if you want to put an image on your computer screen and your computer screen is let's say 1680 like what MacBook Pros are and I want to fill the whole screen I want to output 16 80 pixels done there's no resolution okay because I'm dealing with 1680 pixels if I want to put it on Facebook and I want something that Facebook is the maximum size which I think is 720 although it changes every week I would do 720 if I wanted to output to an iPad 3 or 4 which is a Retina display I would output 20:56 I believe it is and that will fill the whole screen from left to right the resolution is irrelevant doesn't matter okay because we're going from pixels to pixels and as long as I have enough pixels to fill my display without scaling then I'm going to have a nice sharp image all right another example of this would be LCD TVs right you go to the store to buy an LCD TV and you either either get 720p or 1080p but the size is all over the place you can get a 32 inch you can get an 8 inch but they're all 1080p if I'm outputting images from Lightroom and I want to put them on a 1080p TV the size of the TV doesn't matter what matters is that I'm sending out 920 pixels wide because that's what 1080p TV is now whether it's a 32 inch or 90 inch that's different that's that's how many pixels they're fitting into the size of this not how many pics I'm sorry not how many pixels but the size of the pixels that they're going to make the fill of 90 inch but the number of pixels remains the same now when we're printing okay we're converting pixels to dots and that's when resolution becomes important because then we need to be able to output an image that has enough dots so that the image looks nice and sharp okay that's the only time that resolution comes into play and that's why when you output from Lightroom it asks you the size of the image in other words is it going to be 4 inches 6 inches 8 inches 10 inches only when we work with inches or some kind of a physical measurement does resolution come into play so I mentioned before if you have an iMac and it's a 1080p so that would be nine twenty by ten eighty if you printed it at 300 PPI or 300 dots per inch right then the image is going to be roughly six and a half inches wide because we're taking 920 pixels and dividing that by 300 and that leaves us with about six and a half inches but if we print the same image at 180 PPI same image same same pixel number then we wind up with an image that's 10 inches wide because we basically reduced the number of pixels that we need to print per inch okay so this example here is the only time when resolution comes into play let me finish this section and I'll answer okay now another misnomer is resolution requirements for printing for some reason some way back when so at some point somebody decided that we needed 300 DPI to print otherwise you can make a good print and that is simply not the case printers and printer technology and the the resolution of printers has increased so as I mentioned before even though the pixels haven't changed the resolution of the printer has changed we get we get more dots Epson printers have a setting called superfine which actually prints a 2880 but actually even gives you more detail in the same number of pixels depending on how many dots is putting on the paper so prints okay find out prints like this are dependent on size and viewing distance okay a small print is going to it's going to physically require that you hold the closer to you because you that's only where you can really appreciate it and if you hold the print closer to you it's much more it's much easier for you to be able to see the the resolution of the print whereas if it's a large print and you're standing far away from the print because that's really the best way to appreciate it then you don't you're the I cannot resolve the pixels that will the dots that far away and hence it looks just as sharp a kind of a classic example of this if anyone has ever stood in front of a giant billboard you realize that the billboard is made of G's big squares and that would be like the equivalent of dots but as soon as you stand away from it really far away they look they look perfectly sharp or if you got if you go to a basketball game row or some kind of game where they have these big LCD TVs you can tell the state of the dots but from far away they they look really sharp so I think I went one too far so general guidelines is depending on your viewing distance that's how much resolution you're going to need to print so if you're printing at 8 inches okay a print that's 8 inches are smaller you can go up to 480 PPI or dots per inch if you're printing an image that's 24 inches are bigger you can go as low as 180 and as a matter of fact I've printed images that were much bigger than that in images that are 36 40 60 80 inches wide and I print them all at 180 dpi and again the reason is that is because the resolution of the printer in other words the quality the print has gotten better and in order to take in an 80 inch print you just cannot stand in front of it now you might be able to stand up close to the print and put your face right on it but that's not how you appreciate a print that's not how most people are going to appreciate a print okay so you don't need 300 dpi to make a large a good sized print and these are just some general guidelines the best way to find that for yourself is to test test it yourself make a couple of prints print them at different resolution settings and then see if you actually see a difference and my testing has has shown that you don't see a difference almost never see a difference between let's say 300 and 180 unless it's really small and you're really right on top of it now there is what's called native resolution and native resolution is going to be the resolution at which the technology that the printers use is going to give you the best quality so for instance Epson printers use a native resolution of 720 dpi that means that that's the resolution by which their nozzle technology is printing an image without having to manipulate the pixels too much half of 720 is 360 which is going to be more in line with the sizes that you're going to want to make therefore that's what you see recommendations for printing at 360 if you're using an Epson printer okay so if you have an image that's around 300 okay meaning you want to print it on you and you have enough resolution for 300 you're better off just printing it at 360 if you have an Epson on Canon the native resolution is 600 so you can use multiples of two of that so you would use 300 or you wouldn't use 150 because remember I said before 180 is kind of the lowest that you want to go so when I'm printing on my Canon I typically print at 300 dpi unless it's small and I have enough resolution that I go up to 600 anything bigger than let's say 20 inches wide I'll use 180 and same thing with the Epson if I'm going small on the Epson I use 360 or sometimes 720 if not I'll do 1a all right so any questions on resolution and how much you need and printing and well good question the question is if we stay in the larger color space like proto RGB which is what I recommend then how do we deal with going out to different destinations and the color space changing in and that sort of thing one of the reasons why I advocate prophoto RGB is because it also keeps things simple if you know that you're staying in one color space all the time it's simple I have to think about having images in different color spaces so a simplicity is another aspect of staying in prophoto RGB as far as going out though I I mean I've had that problem but it's been a really really long time and part of the reasons because I think a Lightroom does a really great job of making sure that you don't get into that problem so let me show you an example here alright so if I'm in Lightroom and I want to export this image for wherever I want to export it to and others are not printing it but I'm exporting it as a some other digital file I could probably a JPEG you go to the export dialog right here you can hit export and right down here in file settings image format if I switch this to JPEG okay it's going to ask me color space quality okay and the file size as long as I have this set to srgb it's going to render and compress the color space from prophoto RGB RGB to srgb and for the most part it does a pretty good job and therefore once you can convert it to srgb and then you look at that JPEG on your computer you can be sure it's going to look that way anywhere you put it online all right and that's a very simple thing especially if you notice over here there are some presets that you can make and I have one here called for web so if I click on this for web you can see everything is already filled out for me I got a resize to 20 24 1024 by 6 ei t5 I have it sharpened for screen I have it set to srgb jpg at a certain quality that I like so I don't even have to go into this dialog when I'm ready to export these 6:9 images like that I just go right here to file I come down to export with preset I select for web and I'm done when I hit for web it's probably going to ask me where I set my desktop or some folder that I have designated and all those images get exported with the proper profile and the proper color space it's as simple as that all right one second now if I'm printing okay in the print dialog in Lightroom if I go to print this image okay I also have a choice in the print dialog here way at the bottom to choose the rendering intent either perceptual or relative right down here okay those are both grayed out at the moment because I don't have a profile selected but if I had a profile selected I could choose you the perceptual or relative now in the develop module okay I'm switching back to develop now the new feature in Lightroom it's called soft proofing so if I hit the S key that takes me into soft proofing mode and you can see right here there's a little checkbox that turns on telling me I'm soft proofing and then here I have the choice of choosing which profile I'm going to be printing it in including srgb so I can actually soft proof an image in srgb just to see how it's going to look when I convert srgb for the web if I really want to get sort of really critical about that and then I can choose to see which of the two render intents I prefer so one is perceptual one is relative and in this case I'm not seeing much of a difference at all okay that's relative that's perceptual I don't see much of a difference but you're seeing it in the sRGB color space not the prophoto RGB color space when you go into soft proofing and you're choosing your profile okay and the nice thing is that this is done in Lightroom on the original raw file without creating any extra files without creating more stuff on your hard drive that you have to sort of manage now one other really nice feature of Lightroom as far as soft proofing is that let's say hypothetically that when I convert when I soft proofed an sRGB that there was a change that I noticed that perhaps the colors got less saturated or they got lighter or darker and I wanted to bring that contrast back right as soon as I make a change here so let's say if I increase contrast like that Lightroom asked me right away if I want to create a proof copy okay and if I hit yes create a proof copy and now creates what is in essence a virtual copy of that raw file with those settings for that for that basically that sort of output so in other words if I go back into the library module you see here I have my original which is untouched and then I have a virtual copy and this virtual copy has that extra amount of contrast that I added so I could actually create proofs for printing onto a particular paper so in my home setup at home what I have is I might have this print here and then I might have two virtual copies and one would be labeled with the name of the profile Lightroom automatically adds the name of the profile and one would be cans on photographic and the other one might be cancer on brighter and that's the that's the file that I would choose in Lightroom to print when I went to variety because I've made adjustments looking at the profile for brighter to that it looks nice and and inaccurate on a brighter paper and this would be something that would be much more complicated to do in Photoshop because then you would have to save out different versions as TIFF or PSD files you have to name them properly you have to remember where they are god forbid you forget what the heck you did six months later etc and this is still reading from the same raw file so yes we do have this big pro photo 16-bit raw file but I can make ten virtual copies and I'm not taking any more harddrive space than I need to and it also keeps everything nice and tidy because I can stack these in Lightroom that's a light room feature but you know so it makes managing this workflow I think a lot simpler and a lot easier thing another thing I mentioned also is Lightroom can import and adjust Photoshop files TIFF files and JPEG files so it's not just limited to RAW files and you can print from any of those files as well so it might be the case that I happen to have a Photoshop file for an image that it just you know it's a Photoshop file for whatever reason I don't have the original role I can bring that into Lightroom and manipulate it edit it what have you so or if someone sends me files to print and they send me a tiff file I bring it into Lightroom as a tiff file and then I can print from there and make adjustments whatever we are like yes sir no not really because you're printing it smaller so you know what I mean like 300 600 dpi you're going to generate a smaller image so when you go to print it at the same size you know in effect you using the same amount of ink yeah I don't know if there's any correlation between there is a correlation between there isn't any there isn't any correlation between the resolution setting in Lightroom however when you're printing when you set your settings for your printer if you use a higher resolution in the printer then you may incur a little bit of any loss but I think it's pretty negligible and I think you'd agree that you want the best-looking print you can get it so so anybody else yeah just one last thing I want to show here real quick one thing that you should download that's I only got one or two slides left is this is what's called a test chart you can find these online pretty easily if you just google test charge you can find these and a lot of people give them away I think Bill Atkinson I don't know the exact website but he he makes these readily available and they're useful because this is a file that has you can see all types of colors and shades of tonalities and different textures and why this is useful is because usually what I do with this is when I download when I want to try a new paper and I have a new profile I'll print this test chart out and when that test chart matches what I have on screen then I have a sort of a reference that I can work with if my monitor is calibrated properly okay so if I've calibrated my monitor I know it's calibrated properly and then I print this test chart and my test chart is off from I print or from my screen right then I know one of two things I know that either a my the paper profile is not working too well or my screen is I calibrated properly if it looks exactly the way it should look in other words it matches what's on my screen then I know that I'm using the right profile it works the profile looks good and my mother's calibrated now if I go ahead and then make my own prints of my own images and they don't match well now you know where to start now you know where to look for the problems and the problem is going to be in my own work because somehow I've managed to not properly adjust this image to get true colors on screen if I just the test start show me that it works so it's just a way to kind of establish a reference okay and that's pretty much it as far as the presentation goes all right thanks thank you very much whether you're a hobbyist or a professional bnh has the answers to your questions experience a world of technology at our New York City superstore connect with us online or give us a call our staff of experts is happy to help

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 464,361

Keywords: landscape, Canson Infinity, bhvideos, robert rodriguez jr., BH Photo Video, pro audio, paper stock, photography, B&H Event Space, video, printing, bh photo, B&H, BH Photo

Id: LqE8FBiDLwE

Length: 86min 56sec (5216 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 17 2013