hey guys welcome or welcome back thanks so much for joining me today we're going to talk about
prints and printing and answer some questions that you guys have sent in over the last year or so
so yeah like i just said basically today we're going to go through some printing things for
like when you're first sending your artwork to print when you're printing client orders and
when you're actually deciding and finding what products you want to sell as a photographer so
that's kind of what we're going to cover today if you haven't already please do make sure that you
press the subscribe button and hit the bell icon the bell icon will help you actually give you a
notification every single time i upload a video i upload every single week and sometimes more than
if i feel like it and if i have time so this image that you guys can see on the screen right now
is an image that i like to use for test prints there's it's one of quite a few different ones
but i think it's a really good one to explain everything with today so i'm trying to find a
different type of print different type of paper that would suit an exhibition that we've
got coming up but by the time you've watched this the exhibition will already have happened
but i need some uh images printed and they're going to be printed
really really big so it's going to be a super expensive order and i need to make
sure that the images come out exactly how i want them how i want my artwork to be seen
so with that in mind i want to run through today what happens when you first send an image to print
because nearly everybody who sends their images to print says when they get that first piece back
it's not like it looked on my computer i have my computer calibrated why does it look different and
it's kind of a bit confusing but essentially calibrating your screen your monitor is
absolutely vital in my personal opinion to getting good print so if you haven't done
that you don't know what that is i will add a link to a video above which talks all about calibration
if you already know calibration you've already got your computer calibrated it might be that
you think that that's it and one of the most important things when you're calibrating your
screen for printing is the brightness now i'm obviously working on a i think it's 2019 5k imac
and if you look at the brightness i'm like about half brightness here which is my calibrated
brightness level that is right for my print house and my printing and that is actually also what my
calibrator says to have my brightness set to with our kind of brightness setup what i would always
recommend doing before you have an order with a client before you decide on your print type
before you decide on your papers go ahead and send a file to a print house now send the file
finished so you're not going to touch this at all so this exact file no changes happen after this
went to the print house and the print house in this instance was loxley colour here in the uk
and loxley printed the image on five different papers and those five papers were either things
that i'm including in there as a guide so a luster paper i know how my images are going to look on
a luster paper but the other papers are obviously very different so what i wanted to do was
look at those prints and this is what i would recommend everybody does send your test images
out get the same image printed on multiple different papers and then get those papers
back when you've got them back especially with my pieces that are printed on fine art
you're probably going to want to have some art gloves because uh white cotton gloves are just
kind of essential when you're dealing with fine art papers so i'm going to put my art gloves on
and now this is probably a really good time to introduce you guys to the screen bar plus from
benq so thank you actually full disclosure sent me this to see what i thought of it and
i actually couldn't be without it now i know it sounds really weird but essentially you've got a
little button on your desk you can turn it on and off it does also brightness and also color correct
as well but you can change the brightness i'm not going to touch it because it's right for my prints
but it's really useful for checking your prints against your screen which i'll come on to in a
second let me grab a print okie cookie so this is one of the prints that went to the print
house it's the exact same file that you can see up here and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to
rest it underneath my screen on a hard drive now that is being lit almost perfectly by the screen
bar which is what i think it's incredible for because it almost perfectly lights it for you
and then what you want to do when you've got your test prints back is really assess which one looks
closest to what's on the screen in front of you in terms of your calibrated monitor so you guys
can see that we've got super deep shadows over on the sides of this image but we do have the detail
coming through here i love a matte effect from a fine art paper and in this print you can see
the detail up this side it's all here you can see it so actually this is a really nice print
the paper if you're wondering on this one is the fuji photo rag from loxley color and
it's absolutely fine you can see you probably hopefully will be able to see using this camera
the marks on the front that's because if you don't wear gloves the fine art prints mark
super easily so be careful so that was one the shadows are a little bit dark for my liking but
i think it's a really good representation of what we've got on the screen here the colours
are looking great i know that there'll be a colour variation up there but um in in person they look
accurate now look look what happens when we get a different one okay so these two side by side
should be useful to look at just move my water bottle there so we've now got on desk
different prints happening so we've got the photo rag which is fine art and then we also
have a fine art german etch the german etch we can see when we're comparing the shadow sections
that the german etch has a lot more shadow detail to it it's lifted the blacks more than the photo
rag the photo rag has slightly more accurate color representation it's more magenta and that color is
more accurate to what we're seeing on the screen however i prefer the look of this one let me go
ahead and show you what the difference is in terms of photographic prints versus fine art so these
two are both fine art prints but so here we have a luster print so this is the luster print you can
see that it looks fine right but then you put it down next to another image that's got better color
reproduction and suddenly things are looking a bit strange it's green in comparison and the colors
have all shifted green they've all shifted or warmer and the look and feel is just not
something that i personally enjoy so i don't have my work printed on lustr because i don't think it
looks as good so in this instance what i wanted to do was go ahead and pick which one i felt was
the best print version of this image all things considered highlights shadows colour sharpness
very very important that you look at all three things along a different set
of images so let's go ahead and just pop these two to one side and look at this one
so we've gone and printed our image we've selected which print we want to work with
so now it's time to balance the two out remember me saying earlier on that when you print something
it's very unlikely that it will look exactly how it does on your screen
now that's for multiple different reasons but the main one is that your screen is backlit
your image is front lit so the look and feel of that is always going to be different it's one
of the great things about this bar because it lights the print more so than the screen so it
just means that you've got a much better kind of workflow now in this instance i can see that the
image on the screen right now is more magenta than the print that's in front of us now so what i want
to do is work out how much that shift is and what i'm trying to do is work out what steps it would
take to get to what i've got here compared to this and then i'm going to reverse them
and make that into a print action so this is really important if you wanted to print your work
really consistently and get exactly what you want coming out so what we can do is go ahead and use
a duplicate layer on your main image what i want to know is how much do i have to change
things by to get this to look like this so i'm going to go ahead and open up a probably a colour
balance adjustment layer at the moment you could use curves you could use camera oil filter you
can use whatever you want i don't mind and what i'm wanting to do is just kind of balance out the
the greens the magenta so just bring those two together a little bit more so i'm just gonna
prop that up a little bit and what i'm going to do is basically use the colors i can see in this and
get them to match so i'm going to need more green i mean to be fair that was it really those two
are pretty much a perfect match now so that's plus five on the green you see
so i'm going to just keep a mental note of that in my head i can always go back to it and have a look
and then i'm going to look at my shadow lift so the shadows are lifted
fair extent i'm gonna go for curves i'm gonna just lift my shadows up a little bit
actually that's pretty much what i can see in front of me
okay so we're going two down on the highlights and
three up on the black so i'm looking my input and output you see that's three up
for the output and two down the output on the whites so i know that my adjustment that i
need to add as an action to make sure that i get exactly what i want to come out in print
is to do a minus five shift from green to magenta in the color balance and do a curves where i'm
crushing the blacks by three and lifting the highlights up by about two so what i'm going to
do is remember those if you can't remember them just write them down i'm going to delete these
and then what i'm going to do is go ahead and make a new document from this point of the image so i'm
going to go into history i'm going to go ahead and go down to this icon here click that that gives us
another image which is basically at the exact same point as the previous layer and then what we're
going to go ahead and do is go for window arrange and i'm going to tile up vertical this gives me a
really easy way of kind of looking at the images that we've got working with at the moment and this
one's the one that i'm going to make my action on so i know what my steps are i can go into actions
i can switch from button mode and go ahead and add it new action which can be print prep
and go ahead and press record now with that recording in action don't do anything else but
create your steps so you need to make sure that you've got your adjustments in to balance out what
you've got when you print it so i'm going to go ahead and go for a color balance i'm going to do a
minus 5 on that so i'm going to shift it more magenta because it loses the magenta when it's
in print on this particular paper i'm then going to go ahead and do a curves adjustment layer
and the curves adjustment at this point easy to go ahead and bring the blacks down a little bit
i'm not going to do too much and lift the whites up a little bit and that will prep us for print
now when you look at this and you're comparing this to this it looks ridiculous the thing is
is as soon as that's printed it looks perfect so the point of all of this and the point of this
video i'm hoping that i've at least kept some of you till this point because it's really important
is to not have a panic when things come back from the printers and look completely different
instead work with the differences to create a set of actions that correct it for your images
it's up to you which finish you like you might prefer one of the ones that i don't like from
today but those you're happy with and your clients are that's all that counts i hope this video has
been helpful for you if it has please do let me know and i'll see you all again really really soon