before making your print with DxO PhotoLab you first need to soft prooof the image you'll find
the soft proofing controls in the color group of the customized module soft proofing is important
for three reasons first we can use it to check the paper we want to print onto to see that it
can handle the colors in the image in a previous video I explained how to do this as well as how to
check for out of gamut colors the second reason is that we can choose the best rendering intent for
the printing this is important information that we need to use in the Photolab print dialogue the
third reason is that we can adjust our image to ensure that the colors and tones are accurate in
the print once we're done with the soft proofing we can set up the printer I'm using an Epson
Stylus Pro 3880 to make my print and I'm printing to A4 paper I can set this up in photolab using
the page setup options in the file menu you can see the dialogue has an option to choose the size
and orientation of the paper in the top dropdown I'm going to to pick my Epson stylus printer the
paper size is already set to A4 but I can change this and even set a custom size then I can set
the orientation which for this image I want to be landscape and I'll also leave the scaling set to
100% because there's no need to change it we can do everything else that we need to do in the print
dialogue so I'll click the OK button to apply these changes now it's time to print the image
using the print command in the file menu this opens the print dialog where we can configure
the print settings now I'm using a Mac for this and I know that printing in Windows often looks
different unfortunately I don't have access to photolab on a Windows computer so I can't tell
you if there are any differences I'll try to explain my settings as we go so that if you're
using Windows hopefully they'll make sense at the top of the dialog I first need to select the
printer to use because I have a couple of printers attached to this computer next we have a dropdown
called presets this is where I can choose a preset to use and save new ones these will be used to set
up the print options in the dialog and I'd recommend using them and saving your own there
are a lot of options and it's easy to miss some settings if I expand the dropdown you can see a
group of four presets that come with Photolab then below this are any custom presets that
you've created if I select one of the photolab presets you can see that the preview changes to
maximize the image size on the paper what you may not realize is that some of the controls needed to
produce a good print could be hidden it's only when I click the show detail button that the
dialogue expands so I can change the settings the new section of the dialogue then has a dropdown
at the top which I can use to navigate between groups of settings this is the approach used on
a Mac to navigate the different settings in the print driver so it may be different on a Windows
PC what dxo has added are the three options at the top that begin with dxo we'll start with the
color and sharpness settings this is where we can choose to have either the print driver manage the
color or photo lab I've been able to produce good prints using both options but you do need to set
them up correctly if I choose to have the print driver manage the color it's going to disable
the profile and intent options we'll then need to set those in the print driver or it won't produce
an accurate print but if we have Photolab manage the color we can set up the other options in the
dialogue first let's choose the color profile we want to use for the print this should be
the same one that we use when soft proofing and should match the type of paper chosen for the
print for this example I'm using the Fotospeed smooth Pearl 290 paper and I've already done my
soft proofing next we have the intent which is the rendering intent used to handle out of gamut
colors if you don't know what I'm talking about watch my photo laab soft proofing video where
I explain all this again we want this to match the rendering intent we decided on during soft
proofing for printing to the smooth Pearl paper I'm using the relative rendering intent finally
we have the sharpness settings this controls the level of sharpness applied to the image to
compensate for the softening effect of printing it's set to 50% by default which seems to produce
a good result in my testing I'm printing to a semi gloss paper but you may find that you
need to increase this for a matte paper and if if you've already used a tool like Nik sharpner Pro
to apply output sharpening you can disable this option altoe the next dxo setting group is for
the image this has things like rotating the image to fit the paper and adding captions to the print
I'm not going to use any of these so I'll move on to the layout this is where we can change the
layout so that you can print multiple images on a single sheet of paper it's also where I
can set the margin around the print I mentioned earlier with this this image a small margin of
10 mm top and bottom is all that I want this is in addition to any margin that your printer might
set if you don't have it set to print borderless that's the dxo specific settings out of the way
and we can move on to the printer settings the page attributes are what we set earlier in the
page setup if you forget to check them you can also change the settings here most of the other
settings can be left unchanged but there are a couple that I found are worth checking the
first first is color matching which gives me two options I set this to color sync and then the
profile to automatic this should synchronize the printer to use the profile I set earlier in the
dxo color controls the other group to check is the printer settings and I'd recommend checking
these each time you make a print whilst I was experimenting with the printing for this video
I had a few unusual things including this dialogue changing to new settings it's best to check this
every time as it can give you unexpected results if something's changed I'll also highlight that
these settings are from my Epsom stylus print driver so yours may be different despite this
you should still be able to work out your settings if I walk through the options I've changed first I
can select the type of paper I'm using in the media type dropdown the photo speed paper is
a premium photo paper with a semi gloss finish so I'll choose that if you're unsure which setting is
best try reading the information sheet that comes inside most boxes of photo paper it's the one that
most people tend to ignore and it often contains information about which printer settings to use
for the best results when I choose the media type it's telling the printer what type of surface it
will be printing on so it can adjust the ink accordingly a common mistake is to think that
this is a printer profile but it isn't what it will do on some printers like mine is change the
type of black ink used for the print some printers come with a separate matte black ink cartridge
that can be used when printing to matte paper this is set automatically in my print driver when
I choose the media type the other settings that I want to use are to print using 16 bits per Channel
and I can set the resolution of the printer I'm just using the 1440 option as it's fine for the
demo print and it uses less INC now that I've configured all these settings I can click the
print button to make a print but don't forget you can also save these as a preset using the
dropdown and here's a photo of the finished print that was produced now earlier I said that soft
proofing is essential to producing an accurate print watch this video next to see how it's done
with Photolab thanks for watching today and I hope you found this helpful don't forget to subscribe
if you haven't already and please take a moment to share this I'll see you soon for another video