Fotocreativo is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we can earn an affiliate commission at no additional cost to you. As an Amazon Associate, we earn on qualified purchases. Learn more
Print professional quality photos. Now that we're all walking around with high-resolution cameras in our pockets (i.e., our smartphones), people are taking more photos than ever before. But we rarely turn our digital images into prints, let alone spend the time and effort to print your photos the right way. This is too bad. A print not only allows you to better appreciate your photos, but we also have the technology today to make the best prints possible, turning your home office into a professional photo lab.
How to print your professional photos?
Why does my print look different to the screen? The most confusing problem when it comes to making your own prints is the inevitable mismatch between what you see on your computer screen and what you see on the print. Shadows come out too dark, reds look orange, do you? In truth, this doesn't have to be inevitable.
How to print your professional photos?
"The challenge of making a great, bright, colour-accurate print is a journey that starts with two main questions," Richmond told us. "First, are the colours you see on the screen what you think they are? Two, is the printer set up to accurately reproduce the colours on the screen?
While there are standards for calibrating computer screens, many monitors do not conform to them at the factory. The reasons for this can vary, but it probably boils down to what a photographer needs versus what a marketing department thinks consumers want. Monitors often boast about how incredibly bright they can be (some say the manufacturers are trying to fool you), but a screen at its brightest is rarely good for photography. Judge the exposure on a screen that is too bright and you can adjust your image to make it darker, leading to a print that is too dark.
From file type to colour management to paper type, the path to producing great art begins with a lot of science.
While brightness is relatively easy to fix, colour is a much more complicated problem. Even if a monitor is calibrated correctly at the factory, its colour will change over time.
"Colour calibration should be an essential part of any digital imaging workflow," said Richmond. "Otherwise, it's impossible to know if the colours being displayed are truly accurate."
While there are built-in tools to calibrate your display with the naked eye, Richmond explained that the only truly accurate solution is to use a hardware colourimeter, such as those from X-Rite and Datacolor . These devices sit on the screen and measure the hue, saturation and luminance of specific colour patches and then create a monitor profile that tells your graphics card how to adjust its output to display the right colour. It may sound complex, but the software handles everything more or less automatically, which can make using a colourimeter much simpler (and more accurate) than manual calibration.
That still sounds too complex (and expensive) for me ...If you'd rather not bother calibrating your monitor (you should, but we get it, not everyone is going to), there are still some steps you can take to make sure your prints look good.
How to print your professional photos?
First, you can't trust your eyes. If you adjust the colour and brightness to your liking on a poorly calibrated monitor, you could be wasting your time. Instead, rely as much as possible on the data. Looking at the histogram in Lightroom or Photoshop can quickly tell you if an image is over or underexposed, and you can make adjustments accordingly without clipping its shadows or highlights.
If there's something in the image that you know is supposed to be white or neutral grey, you can use Lightroom's automatic white balance tool to accurately set the white balance, but try to set the white balance by eye and you could end up way off in the image. print.
Next, be sure to download the paper profiles from the manufacturer of the paper you are using. For original papers, such as those from Epson and Canon, the profiles are likely to already be built into the printer. But any good third party paper manufacturer will make their profiles available for download (here are the ones from Moab , Hahnemühle , Canson and Red River ).
A paper profile is to your printer what a monitor profile is to your GPU: it lets the printer know how that particular paper will react to the ink so that the printer knows how to leave it. Papers differ in a number of ways, from their surface quality (e.g. glossy or matte) to their actual colour gamut (the range of colours they can reproduce), so it is important to use the right profile.
For best results, print from an application that has the option to manage printer colours, such as Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom. This is where you can select third-party printer profiles.
Using the correct profile for your printer and paper combination does not mean that your prints will automatically look like your monitor, but it does reduce the number of variables in the equation. If you do a test print and, for example, it comes out too dark, you know the error is in your display. You can make a simple brightness adjustment to the image to correct it.
OK, great, but I'm just going to send my images to a lab.
Great! We understand that not everyone wants to invest or bother owning and operating a photo printer, but that doesn't change the importance of the steps above.
How to print your professional photos?
A photo lab, at least one worth its salt, should offer profiles for the printers and papers it uses. You can download these profiles and use them to test your images on your home computer, so you have an idea of what to expect (assuming you have a calibrated monitor).