Printing your own photos: vital first steps in using your new photo printer. Paper and photo choices

hi my name is keith cooper and this short video follows on from what i did about initial setup of a new printer for photo printing and looks at a bit more about how you first get into printing and some of the things you need to remember and some of the things to avoid uh if you want to save wasting a lot of ink and paper because printing is a great thing to do but a lot of people get discouraged early on because the prints just don't come out how they want um people say what my prints they're not properly matching my screen well prints can never match a screen i've looked at color management elsewhere but i will keep coming back to this point looking at a screen and hoping to just go print and have a print come out that looks identical to what's on the screen is a pretty much full-on hope you can make great prints but you have to remember that the print is not the screen and vice versa but apart from that first of all this printer here this particular one under this pile of prints here is an epson xp 15000 one of the ones i've tested in the in the last few months this is not about epson printers this is not about canon printers it's about if you've got a new printer and perhaps if you're new to printing things you want to take note of first of all whilst you perfectly well can connect a phone up directly to a printer on cameras you can connect them up and print if you get nice pictures out of it then consider yourself lucky um it is simply not a consistently good way of turning your images into prints i'm sorry but you're going to need to do some editing and part of that comes from that thing of the screen is not the print because the screen not just this screen that goes for the screen on the back of your camera or on your phone or on your tablet or whatever um some form of adjustment is likely to be needed now i've mentioned before that when you first set things up print some test images um testament known test images i've got loads of them on the norflight images website you can download but test images give you a way of understanding the printer settings so you can use them as a basic test because it doesn't matter about the screen you don't edit them when you print them you can use them as a basic test that everything's working okay and that your print setup that you want to use for printing your files is working okay and you can also use it for deciding which settings work best now without looking very closely at these prints here apart from the fact i can feel one of them's on a much thinner paper there is pretty minuscule difference between these prints the differences are there and they are due to the different types of paper and how i've changed the settings of the printer driver however don't expect huge differences by changing the settings so for example choosing the absolute highest resolution settings the finest detail settings on the printer driver all that happens in most instances is that the print takes longer to come out of the printer you may be able to see a difference if you get a magnifying glass out you may well be able to see a difference if you get a um a loop out or a hand lens such as this one however i'd observe that in all my years of selling prints not one person who has ever looked at a print close up and looked at fine detail has bought a print uh the people who do that are other photographers real people who buy prints who put prints on walls and things are not interested in viewing their print at about two or three inches distance they're interested in what it looks like from a reasonable viewing distance on a wall or whatever just remember that when you get into printing and you read perhaps on forums people talking about depth micro contrast dmax all these technical terms um they're mostly completely irrelevant they can be useful but the moment someone starts talking about d-max about prince they're no longer talking about what the picture looks like they're talking about technical stuff but anyway we'll skip through that one your monitor makes a big difference um i try and get a good quality model this is a benq monitor i've tested a few of this particularly even larger one recently and it's uh very high quality image quality other expensive monitors are available as well but every single image that i sent to a client or i print goes via the monitor so it's worth getting a reasonable monitor a reasonable monitor on its own is not although it needs calibrating and profiling now the calibration profiling sometimes simply just called calibration it's done using a hardware device such as this this is an x right i1 display that just measures colors uh there's the data color version of it in its box that's the spyder x there are loads of these i've done reviews and some videos about profiling but suffice to say you want to get your monitor into a known accurate state and you do that with one of these things by the way you don't need to leave these attached and if you have a monitor like this it comes with calibration software now that calibration software will use one of these devices but it's better to use the monitor makers calibration software than it is to use the software that came with this um or the or the data color one it's just you know you're going for a high-end monitor so it's definitely worth making use of all the features i've said before that when you start with printing don't go overboard on buying papers by all means after you've done a few test prints and things um get some sample packs see how they perform but perfect your printing on a few samples they don't need to be large they don't need to be like a3 plus size here you can do it on a4 perfectly well but perfect your printing using just a few basic papers from the company that made the printer so canon papers for canon printer epson papers for an epson printer and that's the key to to doing it you print small test prints you learn the correct settings how to take your image to go from what you've got here to what you're printing now this instance um it's kind of varied uh look i've obviously deliberately gone for this black background there are issues in trying to print bright colors like this so when you're doing your first prints don't go for strong brightly colored images like this or this go for something i hate to say a bit more bland uh because it's one of my favorite pictures go for something that's a little less extreme like this picture is taken in colorado um the storm front uh sagebrush just starting to sprout and there's some cottonwood trees just first flash of green on them um i'm saying this because you almost certainly can't actually see it via the video but pick a fairly normal image the reason i say that is because when you're printing certain features are more difficult to transfer from an image you see on screen to print in particular in this instance the bright colors these traffic lights these uh various streaks of lighting some of the deep colors here this is quite a tricky image to print well it's not difficult but you do have to take care of it whereas a a more normally toned image like that or this larger one also taken in colorado there are no real extremes of color brightness or anything these are much easier to print um obviously this is an a2 size print it wasn't printed on this printer this was done on an epson p900 by remember rightly but there's the difference between a3 plus and a2 which is why personally when people say what printer would you want keith um i go a big one because big prints work but so you practice printing an image like this and um now turn it the right way up it's actually trees and snow aspens with shadows from low angle sun on it probably looks in on this video much the same when i had it the wrong way up but anyway there you go it looks a nice picture when you actually see the thing so there we go we've got some basic printing to start off with now i'm shooting this video uh with led lighting um here i've got some daylight coming in from some windows here it's cloudy but um there's some daylight so it's mixed lighting how do you decide whether your prints are too dark too bright the easiest way is to view them in the place where you're going to hang them so if you are going to put prints up in a room lit like this then this lighting is ideal for checking your prints now i will come back to this when i look at soft proofing and other things in future videos but suffice to say find somewhere consistent to do your print checking to look at how the brightness has come out because this print will look quite different in the room through here which has currently got no light switched on the brightness darkness of the viewing does make a difference and that is something you might want to allow for when you print when you edit your files and this comes back to perhaps one of the most important bits and i mentioned earlier when i said don't print directly from a phone or a camera tablet is editing now i'm not going to recommend anything particularly for editing i happen to like photoshop but then i've used photoshop for over 20 years so i'm very familiar with it i know what it does i use it for all my testing and things like that it works great some people like lightroom personally i really don't like it never have done but that's just a personal opinion i'd also suggest trying something like affinity photo not only is it relatively cheap it's exceedingly good and it's fast catching up with what photoshop can do i could do much of my work using affinity photo i don't just because i'm used to using photoshop this year but i do test these other bits of software as well there are other editing packages as well but whatever you do when you print you need to use icc profiles now i've mentioned printer profiles elsewhere and i'll be coming back to this in other videos the profiles are what characterize the paper ink printer combination they're in a way a sort of translation document that allows you to go from what's the image itself through the printer driver to droplets of ink and that's all this is droplets of ink the software decides where the droplets of ink are going to go and what how what mix they're going to be and part of that is comes in for using a printer profile if you start your testing using basic papers so for this epson printer maybe a luster paper or gloss paper if you like gloss and maybe a matte art paper of some sort so they don't need to be big sheets a4 is fine you'll find that epson and canon for their printers and papers provide profiles now printing with profiles is it won't necessarily make your pictures always come out spot-on correct color management is not about perfect color some illusory concept like that to me color management and that includes calibration of your monitor profiling of your papers less so cameras but i have i've mentioned that elsewhere but color management is about making things come out right first time more often color management gives me the confidence to print an image with strong colours like that and be fairly confident that what i'm working on will produce a print that i like note that i don't say a print that looks like this because the best looking image on the screen may not produce the best looking print um it's a bit more of a subtle that's one of the reasons i say to avoid when you're first testing things images like this and to some extent images like this because to get good prints you need a bit of editing experience but there we have it so that that's that's the basics this goes for even if you decide to do black and white as well essentially start simple profile calibrate your monitor use printer profiles for the paper and don't go overboard on getting hundreds of papers because essentially if you don't have the experience of printing on just a few simple papers how do you know that one print is better than another how do you know that you try new paper the prints look great how do you know that's just not because your previous prints were incompetent i make mistakes i take a while to learn a new printer i get lots of printers to test lots of papers to test i mess things up occasionally and that's i do stuff like this this is part of my job i'm an architectural photographer and sometimes i provide prints i also sell a few prints as well most of my work is supplied digitally but even so i use colour management to make sure everything comes out right and consistent and i practice and that's it it can be a bit tedious but well worth it in the long run and causes far less problems wasted paper wasted ink down the line so hopefully that's been of some help if you find these videos of use please do subscribe to the channel please ask questions as well i do my best to try and answer questions that are as connected with the videos particularly because they often give me ideas for other videos that i might have might not have thought of so thank you very much

Channel: Keith Cooper

Views: 4,138

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Id: vhvI8-8Knfw

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021