Printing MISTAKES I Wish I STOPPED Sooner! (Landscape Photography)

many thanks to squarespace for sponsoring this week's video so there is one thing that i've never ever covered on this channel and i suppose i probably shouldn't say that i'm sure there could be more than one thing but the one thing i'm referencing is printing and upon my return home from my recent waterfall excursion in last week's video one of the things i was most interested in with the with this new camera the uh the fuji gfx 100s was how well the image is printed i knew they'd be great but how great that was really the the question and the answer i was after that would ultimately help me with my buying decision and after all that's one of the the biggest benefits of using a high resolution camera is its ability to create images that can be printed large with stunning detail now when it comes to printing my experience is that it's one of the more difficult aspects of photography and at the same time one of the most rewarding and educational as well and in this video i want to share with you what i've learned from printing my own photos for i guess the past four years now along with perhaps most importantly the the mistakes that i made throughout this learning process in hopes that this video will help i guess accelerate the learning curve so to speak for any of those looking to get started with printing their own landscape photos now there was quite a few comments in last week's video about printing those images off as big as i possibly could and i did print out the my favorite image from that video i got a couple of prints here i made some purposeful mistakes here just to use as examples in this video and i also have a much larger print back there which is the the final version which i'll i'll show you kind of a zoomed in um like a b-roll clip of that uh of that print just so you can see the detail in those images from the the fuji gfx100s but it is it is pretty uh remarkable how detailed the the prints came out so i'm pretty excited about that but as far as the mistakes are concerned and these are rated and they're not rated in order of importance i think they're all extremely important but um they're actually rated in order as they occurred throughout my own learning process so the very first mistake is the very first thing that i encountered when i got my printer so to jump right into it the very first mistake is something that i call jumping right in and what it is is when i purchase my printer and i have the canon pro 1000 which is a fantastic printer it's not the top of the line it's not kind of a lower tier it's kind of right in the middle but i got the printer at home i unboxed it i was super excited i threw all the ink cartridges in and i started to kind of go through my lightroom catalog to find my favorite print and i wanted to print it out pulled it up hit print and printed it out that was it print came off the printer and i'm looking at it and i'm going this doesn't look anything like what i thought it would look like it doesn't look anything like the image on my computer and the issue with that is basically that i didn't do my due diligence and i didn't study up and figure out all the steps that are required before you actually print an image i just figured i could find the photograph and print it and i started printing image after image after image and i printed large prints and i wasted a ton of ink and i wasted a ton of paper ink's not cheap paper's not cheap and what i should have done is understand the required steps involved and i'll walk you through my entire print workflow here shortly but i didn't quite understand what was needed to get a image ready for print and that was one mistake and then the other mistake is i was printing all these test prints off which at the time i didn't know were test prints i thought they were the final prints but i printed them all large and you should never print test prints large you know in the very beginning i always take one sheet of paper and i'll print maybe five or six different versions different tests on that single sheet of paper saves you ink saves you paper and then once you get the image to a point to where you're you're starting to feel good about it then you can start printing a little bit bigger but jumping right into it without doing the the proper due diligence to figure out the steps involved that was a major major mistake now the second mistake and this is probably the most common this is the one you hear the most about and it's something that i call uncalibrated monitor and this is the the calibration device that i use this is the x right i1 and there's a ton of these on the market they're not super expensive i think this one was around hundred dollars and i'll link it below if you want to take a look at this one but they're real simple to use they basically hang on your monitor on the screen kind of like this and they come with software that you load on your computer it starts flashing all these kind of crazy colors on your screen and this device measures how those colors are rendered on your particular screen and it can make any kind of adjustment because all all monitors are shipped a little bit differently i know my apple imac 5k monitor and my macbook pro they all seem to be a little bit cooler uh straight from the factory and once i calibrated it it kind of warmed up a lot of those of the tones in the screen but most importantly at least in my mind it's the thing that i struggle with a lot but this kind of helps to solve it is that it measures the ambient light in the room and it'll adjust the screen brightness and on both my my imac and my macbook pro it actually lowered the screen brightness to just maybe i think two stops underneath or two like little dashes underneath halfway and i think that's a real big issue is because you can turn the screen brightness up on your screen all the way and that's going to completely skew the way your prints might turn out so i would recommend getting a calibration device that can also measure the ambient light in your room and go ahead and adjust this green brightness there but calibrating your monitor is a very very crucial step and it's something that i printed for about three or four months before i even knew that calibrating a monitor was a thing now the third mistake is something that i call single paper now most printers will come with a kind of trial package of paper to test out my printer was no different and i printed you know i quickly burned through the the trial paperwork paperwork the trial paper that my canon printer came with and then i immediately just went to canon's website actually i ordered it from amazon and ordered just the same paper and i printed on the same exact paper for months after month after month and i never changed and the paper was great and i still use it still to this day but i didn't kind of expand my horizons at all and there's so many different fantastic paper manufacturers out there and there's so many different types of print that will all result in a completely different end result you know you have you have matte paper you have gloss semi-gloss lusters there's a lot of different types of paper out there and it helps you kind of the educational process of it all because certain images print better on certain types of paper so if maybe a black and white image will look better on a matte paper or maybe a really vibrant or an image that's got a ton of punchy colors in it that'll look better on a kind of high gloss or semi-gloss or maybe a luster type of paper and just going through that process and broadening your horizons and testing different types of paper will just help you to better understand exactly what type of an image will look best on a certain type of paper and these are the types of paper that i use right now this is a henna melee this is a fine art paper this is a matte smooth paper this is very nice i like this one a lot and then this is the the other paper i use this is the the semi-gloss from canon this is the type of paper that my printer comes with it comes with a much smaller size but this is the the largest size that my printer will actually print but this is a fantastic paper as well but there's those are the two that i oops those are the two that i use mostly but just testing out a bunch of different types of paper is definitely going to help you in your your overall learning curve and your your printing journey as well now the the fourth mistake and this is a really big one it's something that i call no paper profiles and i'll start to kind of show you walk you through my overall printing process here but a paper profile i've heard this described as kind of like a language there's many different languages all around the world and there's many different ways to say a singular word so maybe the word print is the word print in every single language but it's said completely differently i hope that made sense but when i heard that comparison i was like okay that makes sense of what a paper profile is and you can download these from most paper manufacturers website just kind of punch in exactly what paper profile you're looking for for what type of a paper that you're using of that manufacturers and you can download it it's all for free and you can load it directly into lightroom and it's really cool what it will help you do so as far as my process is concerned this is my favorite image from that waterfall trip in last week's video i always come up here to the develop module and the very first thing i do is come down here to soft proofing you don't notice that that changed the actual border around the image to white but that's not only what it does and it's nowhere even close to the most important thing that it does in my opinion but it adds this dialog box right up here and this is where you can actually select the paper profile so if you come up here to profile and drop this down these are the two profiles that i have logged are have available on my macbook pro most of the printing i do is on my imac but if i select this right here photo henemyly photo rag and i select this right here simulate paper and ink watch what happens to the photograph it completely changes it and what that's doing is it's basically accounting for the paper profile for that type of paper and lightroom's trying to kind of give you an accurate description or a representation i should say of what that image will look like using that paper profile using that paper and then you can make any kind of tweaks from there so if i change this to a different type of hanamili paper smooth you'll notice that changed it a little bit as well now the fifth and final mistake is something that i call not print editing and this is a big one and it's it goes in line with the very first mistake when i first started printing i i didn't even pay attention to the fact that the way that you see an image on a screen is totally different than the way it was printed so if you don't do any printing right now none at all then you're editing your images for the screen you're editing them for your website you're editing them for instagram whatever the case may be they're going to be viewed on a screen and all screens are backlit they all have a light source behind them but when you start to print your photographs that light source is removed you no longer have that and that completely changes the entire ball game so you have to make some subtle changes sometimes the changes are are large changes sometimes it's very minor but i in my experience i've always had to make some changes so what i'll do is i get i go into lightroom and i'll select the paper profile let's just say i'm going to use this one right here and then as soon as you start to make a change let's say i'm just going to increase the brightness a touch lightroom is going to ask you if you want to create a virtual copy for soft proofing and i always say create proof copy and it's basically it's going to create a virtual copy just for this print just that way you don't make any changes to the actual raw file and this file right here this is actually a tiff file i edited this image in capture one send it over to photoshop to finish it up and then i'm gonna send it over to lightroom now to do the actual printing but in my experience i almost always have to increase the exposure a little bit on my photographs and then maybe out on this one maybe decrease the blacks just a little bit and then maybe sometimes if you have an image on the screen that might look a little bit flat already maybe you want to increase the contrast a little bit before you print it but going through that exercise the more you do it the better you're going to get and it just takes practice but like i said in my experience i always have to make some tweaks to my images and it's usually increase the exposure a little bit because that light source is going to be removed from the the paper of course because it's not going to be viewed on a screen and a lot of times i might have to decrease the black point or maybe increase the contrast a little bit sometimes and increase or maybe decrease the vibrance of a particular image but you just have to really practice it every photograph is different the only way you're really going to get better at it is just by doing it more often and i've improved i think when i first started creating test prints sometimes it would take me 20 or 30 test prints before i got an image really dialed in to where i was happy with it now i can usually get it done maybe in five to maybe ten depending on the specific photograph but you don't always have to get the print to look exactly like what you see on the screen it's all personal preference i try and get it as close as i possibly can to the screen but some images are really difficult you just can't do it but i do try and get it to closely resemble what i see on the screen but once i get it to a point to where i'm happy with the way it looks i'll come up here to print and this is the actual print module and then i will always come down here to page setup and this is where you can kind of change the orientation so i just flip it to whoops i hit the wrong one page set up if i flip it to this orientation you'll see it flips it to vertical if i go back put it to right here it's going to change it there and you can actually change the the paper size right here you can put a custom size in right here and then you select your printer that you're going to be using i have the canon pro 1000 and then just select ok then i come down to image setting and then layout layouts where you're going to change your margins so you can do half inch one inch i usually do something between usually maybe around half inch or one inch let's just change this to one inch all the way around so the left right top and bottom and then what's something to note here you have the zoom to fill button right here at the top and if you select this you'll see what it's doing because you can see the border right here and the image is not filling it but if i hit zoom to fill the image will fill that up and then you can grab the image you can kind of move it around to center it up and that's handy because some images are shot in different types of aspect ratios or maybe you have it cropped a certain way and sometimes you do have to use that ideally you won't have to use that because you don't want to lose any of your photograph but sometimes you just have to but that's just something good to note that you do have that option up there so and then once you have your margins set up i i don't really do anything with the guides i don't do anything here with the page i don't do anything with like identity plates or watermarks or anything like that and then as far as the print job is concerned i always leave this print resolution on 300 pixels per inch print sharpening standard and in the media type if you're using matte or glossy paper and then i always leave this on a 16 bit output as well because my printer prints 16 bit and in the profile you can always select a managed by the specific paper profile that i'm using as well because that's going to help the printer ultimately determine exactly the best way to print this particular photograph on that particular paper and that's really the process that i go through and then i'll come up here to printer and then this is kind of just the basic stuff i always put the media or i set that media in quality right here to best and then i hit print and then it prints it off and then kind of go through that process a couple times until i get it really dialed in but those are the five mistakes that i that i encountered and i really do hope that that process will help anyone who's looking to to get into printing kind of like i mentioned earlier accelerate that learning curve so to speak now as far as the the big print goes from the the fuji gfx 100s um i won't hold it up because i know you won't be able to see it well but i will overlay some b-roll of the close-up of this image and i wish i had a macro lens so i could really show you how great the detail looks in this image but you can really see all the the tiny little detail and all the the leaves and all the foliage and especially in areas where the the light is hitting these rocks i mean the detail that came out of this is just absolutely incredible and this is the biggest version of this photograph that i could print on my printer here maybe i could print it a little bit bigger but for the most part that's as big as it would go and i think that the bigger i print this image the more that detail is really going to jump out and i probably will outsource a print and just print it up to a couple feet by a couple feet maybe even bigger than that just to see how good it actually does look but the the results coming off of the print are very very impressive and i'm pretty excited about it so um i think printing's a ton of fun like i mentioned it's very educational as well and i think it's because when you when you look at a photograph on a screen you don't really look at it as long as you would a print and when you're looking at a print hanging on a wall i feel like you spend more time looking at it you spend more time examining certain areas of the photograph and especially if it is your print so i think you end up noticing a lot of things that you might not notice in your image when you are looking at it on a print versus on a screen so it's going to teach you a lot about your own photography and it's going to teach you a lot about what you like in your images and what you don't like and it's going to enable you to make changes moving forward so i think that printing is one of the most beneficial and the most educational things you can do to improve your own photography so i do hope that that information was helpful and before i do wrap up this week's video i want to say just a a real big thanks again to the sponsor of this week's video which is squarespace who i use for all of my website and e-commerce needs squarespace provides a dynamic and attractive online platform to create your website you can display your photography using squarespace's professional portfolio designs and customize the layout and look and feel of your gallery just so you can make it your own with squarespace's traffic overview feature you can track trends and page visits and views to better optimize your content and you can even grow and engage with your customers with squarespace's email campaign tools which will enable you to create engaging emails that match your website with your products your blog post and logo just so your messaging remains consistent so if you're looking to start a new website or possibly upgrade your current website check out squarespace.com forward slash markdenny for a free trial and 10 off your first purchase so if you have any questions about this week's video just leave them in the comment section below and i guarantee i will get back in touch with you and if you did enjoy this week's video if you could give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel if you're not subscribed already and as always i really really do appreciate you watching this week's video and i will see you all next wednesday bye

Channel: Mark Denney

Views: 47,186

Keywords: landscape photography, landscape, photography, mark denney, printing mistakes, printing, photo printing, landscape photography for beginners, landscape photography tips, landscape photography tutorial, how to print landscape photos, photo printing for beginners, how to print photos at home, printing landscape photos, printing photography, printing your photos, lightroom printing, how to print in lightroom, printing your photography, photo printing mistakes, how to print photos

Id: KKIQtbmsWIk

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021