By now, I’m sure you’ve created some artwork that you’re pretty proud of. That being the case, you’re probably thinking about printing it and maybe even hanging it on the wall. After all, keeping all your pictures hidden in your computer is no fun; you want them out where you can see them, in your home, on your web pages, and enhancing the documents you produce. We’ll look at getting images on the Web in the next hour; for now, let’s explore the world of printing. Even in this brave new world of the web-enabled camera phone, the inexcusably cool iPod Photo, and other electronic media, printing isn’t going away, and it never will. There’s an unmistakable appeal to a printed picture that onscreen images just don’t have; it seems to be more a part of the real world.
Printing should be easy; just choose File, Print and watch your image emerge on paper, right? Well, sometimes it’s not quite that simple. Photoshop offers quite a few variables and decisions to make when you’re sending an image to the printer. In this hour, we look at what those options are, from choosing a printer through navigating the series of Print dialogs.
Before you can print anything from Photoshop, you’ll (obviously) need to have a printer. If you’re shopping for a printer, you’ve got a lot of choices. There’s more than one way to produce color on a page, and, of course, black-and-white prints are always needed. An entire book could be written about all the varieties of printers. In this section, we’ll make do with a snapshot of the printing technologies you’re most likely to encounter: inkjet printers, laser printers, and dye-sublimation printers.
The most common color printers these days are inkjets, which produce an image by spraying dots of colored ink onto the paper. The quality of their output varies tremendously, ranging from fair to excellent, depending on how much money you want to spend on a printer. Logically enough, a lot depends on the size of the ink dot that a printer applies, but it’s also important to know whether a printer uses a four- or six-color process. Basic inkjets use a four-color ink cartridge, with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks—the same colors commercial printing presses use. More sophisticated inkjet printers, which these days includes most of what’s on the market, use a six-color process that adds two more inks, usually a light magenta and light cyan. With only four colors of ink, the sparsely placed dots in broad light areas, such as sky, can be too obvious. Using lighter versions of those two inks enables the printer to reproduce lighter colors more smoothly. And high-end printers can use up to 12 colors of ink.
At the inexpensive end of the inkjet spectrum are home and office models, almost all of which can deliver acceptable-quality color printing, such as Hewlett-Packard’s DeskJet series, the Canon Pixmas, and Epson’s Stylus printers.
Note: P.S.
PostScript is a computer language that describes the appearance of a page in perfect detail so that it can be reproduced exactly by a compatible printer. Professional designers and prepress specialists need to worry about PostScript; home users generally don’t.
Inkjet printers are often not PostScript compatible, which may mean that they can’t print PostScript data such as PostScript fonts and EPS-format images. For most Photoshop users, however, this isn’t a problem; just stick to OpenType and don’t save your images in EPS format.
High-end inkjet printers, like Kodak’s Iris models, can cost tens of thousands of dollars; they’re usually found at service bureaus or art studios. These printers can produce very large output, measured in feet rather than inches, with remarkable detail and quality. You can have Iris prints made of your images, but they tend to be expensive, so you’ll want to save this method for your best work. Prices range from $50 to $100 for a single 16×20 page.
Unlike inkjet printers, laser printers use toner, just like photocopiers. They fuse a thin layer of fine powder to the paper with heat, producing an image that won’t run if it gets wet. Laser printers are much faster than inkjet printers as well, an advantage that’s cancelled out for some by their overly bright print colors and glossy surface. If you’re not looking for perfectly accurate color, or if you need only black-and-white prints, a laser printer from a well-known company such as Brother and Hewlett-Packard is a good option.
Most laser printers can produce 300 to 600 dots per inch, and some up to 1200 dpi. They’re particularly good at printing halftone and grayscale images. Some laser printers can even alter the size of the printed dots to improve print quality. Both black-and-white and color laser printers have dropped precipitously in price in the last few years; you can pick up a black-and-white model for under $100 at CompUSA, and color laser printers start at around $200.
Dye-sublimation printers are expensive, but in this case, you definitely get what you pay for. If you want true photographic quality in your prints, a dye-sub printer is your best option. Their image quality is superb because they apply dye to the paper by using sublimation instead of by spraying it on. These printers use special ribbons and paper; you can’t use ordinary paper with them, and the specially coated paper is expensive. You can often find these printers at a print shop, where you can get a single dye-sub print for a modest fee. If you’re satisfied with smaller prints, look into desktop dye-sublimation printers that make 4×6 prints. Several companies make them at reasonable prices, starting at less than $100.
If you want to get the best prints, you need to keep your printer in mind throughout the design process. That means using Photoshop’s color-management features so that what you see onscreen accurately reflects what you’ll get from your printer; otherwise, your color and brightness adjustments won’t have the effect you’re looking for.
With that in mind, it’s important that you configure Photoshop for the monitor and printer you’ll be using, before you even consider printing anything important. This is accomplished in Photoshop’s Color Settings dialog (choose Edit, Color Settings).
To properly manage the color in your images, Photoshop uses a collection of predefined settings for monitors and printers, and even different combinations of ink and paper. Each setting includes a color profile that describes the characteristics of the device in question and conversion options for modifying colors to match the output profile, which should give you consistent color for a particular kind of printer under typical conditions.
Color management is the technology that enables you to move color information from one device (such as a monitor) to another (such as a printer) in a predictable way. Ever heard the term WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)? Well, that doesn’t happen automatically with color because every single monitor, scanner, and printer “sees” and reproduces color differently, even if only a little bit. So color-management software steps in to translate among all these different devices.
Color management is made possible by International Color Consortium (ICC) device profiles, produced by measuring the color characteristics of each device in accordance with a language agreed upon by the ICC (a group of color-management professionals and vendors). To create an ICC profile for a printer, a special target chart with many small squares of color is printed on the printer being profiled. Then a measuring tool called a colorimeter (or, for greater accuracy, a spectrophotometer) is placed over each of the color squares to measure how the printer reproduced the target’s color. The data goes back to the computer, which compares the printed colors against the theoretically perfect colors of the software target and defines the differences between each pair of colors. These differences are all assembled into an ICC profile for that printer, ink, and paper combination. The profile is actually a set of numbers that tells the computer how to adjust the color information it sends to that particular printer to make the printed colors match as closely as possible the colors in the image file. Scanner profiles are produced by scanning a printed color chart, and monitor profiles are created by displaying the chart onscreen and measuring the color squares with a device similar to the one used to measure the printed chart.
Profiles have to be applied by system-level or application-level software. ColorSync is system-level color-management software developed jointly by Apple and Linotype-Hell, and ICM is a similar program for Windows. ColorSync and ICM include profiles of many kinds of monitors, so you can choose yours or at least one similar to it. They adjust color on the monitor so that printer color space (CMYK) is displayed correctly.
What does all this mean to you? Here are a few suggestions:
Do your work in RGB color. If your system includes ColorSync, be sure that you’ve set it up to use the correct profile for your monitor. If you don’t have the right profile, use the Monitor Calibration Wizard (Windows, free download at www.hex2bit.com) or Display Calibrator Assistant (part of Mac OS X). Consider buying a hardware calibration tool such as the Pantone huey ($70) or the Colorvision Spyder ($60), for truly accurate colors.
If you’re printing to a low-end printer with no ICC profile available, don’t convert the image to CMYK mode before printing. The printer driver takes care of this, and it makes the translation in the way that works best for your printer.
Figure 23.1 shows the Color Settings dialog. You can find it near the bottom of the Edit menu, or you can press Command-Shift-K (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+K (Windows) to open it. Be sure to watch the description area at the bottom of the dialog box; it offers you helpful information when you’re deciding which settings to use.
As you can see, you need to make several decisions, even without clicking More Options to show the Conversion Options and Advanced Controls settings. First, you need to use the Settings pop-up menu, shown in Figure 23.2, to specify what sort of work you will be doing most of the time and choose an appropriate setting.
If you know that your work will be printed on standard printing presses (not a home inkjet), apply either the North American, European, or Japanese standard prepress defaults, according to where your printing company is. If, on the other hand, most of your work is headed for a website, choose the Web/Internet settings. Monitor Color is the right choice if you’re creating presentations that will be shown primarily on your own computer (it disables color management). If you do a lot of different kinds of work, choose one of the General Purpose presets.
For a nice change, the Working Spaces settings in the Color Settings dialog box are actually less complicated than they look. RGB asks for the monitor space you want to work in. Choose sRGB if you plan to share your images mostly onscreen, as web images or via email or slideshows; sRGB is a version of RGB that includes the colors that the standard computer monitor can display. If you will be printing most of your images, on the other hand, stick to Adobe RGB; it includes some printable colors that don’t show up in sRGB. In the CMYK field, you need to choose the kind of printer you’re using.
Tip: Customize It
If you spend time customizing your settings, you can save combinations of settings you create by clicking the Save button; then you can reload them (click the Load button) or share them with others whose images need to be consistent with yours.
Gray is the easiest of all. If you use a Mac, choose Gray Gamma 1.8. If you’re running Windows, choose 2.2. These are the basic settings for the method that each system uses to display grayscale images. And Spot refers to pages printed using spot color inks, such as duotones or illustrations done with Pantone colors. The standard setting is Dot Gain 20%, but you need to worry about this only if you’re working on designs that use spot colors and will be professionally printed.
Color Management Policies refers to how Photoshop should handle files created in another application or in an earlier version of Photoshop. Your choices are as follows: preserve the color-management profiles embedded in the file, convert the image to your working profile, or turn off color management. This last choice lets Photoshop display the file in Active mode, while keeping the embedded profile, until you choose to resave it with color-management information from your own system. You can also have Photoshop warn you when a color-management mismatch occurs as you open a file and ask what to do about it. Figure 23.3 shows a typical warning message.
If you click the More Options button, you’ll have additional choices to make. The first of these, in the Conversion Options area, is Engine, which refers to the color conversion engine that Photoshop uses to match colors. Even if you’re using a Mac, you should ignore the Apple ColorSync option and choose Adobe (ACE). It’s designed specifically to work with Photoshop and the other Adobe graphics applications, and using this option helps keep color consistent across all your Adobe programs. For Intent, unless you need to match another version of the image exactly, I suggest that you use Perceptual, which is usually my choice. This option produces the most pleasing colors instead of the most accurate ones by the numbers. The Perceptual option also allows you to print a wider range of colors than, for example, Absolute Colorimetric. Beneath the Engine and Intent menus, check both Use Black Point Compensation and Use Dither, unless your print shop tells you not to. Again, both of these options generally produce better-looking color.
You can usually ignore the Advanced Controls area. You don’t really want to desaturate your monitor or change the color-blending gamma except under rare circumstances, which only an expert user is likely to encounter.
Remember back in Hour 4, “Specifying Color Modes and Color Models,” when you learned how to check the gamut of an image to ensure that all the colors it uses are contained in the range of colors that its destination can produce? This is a useful step to take whether an image will be professionally printed, displayed on the Web, or output on a desktop printer, but it’s most useful in the latter case. Desktop printers tend to have wildly varying gamuts, so knowing that an image looks good onscreen and prints correctly on Printer A is no guarantee that the image will print correctly on Printer B.
When you’ve made the appropriate color settings, as explained in the preceding sections, it’s a good idea to check the gamut on any image you’re about to print. Choose View, Gamut Warning to turn on the out-of-gamut indicator, which takes the form of gray patches in the image window (see Figure 23.4). Now you can use any of the adjustment tools to modify out-of-gamut colors so that they edge back into your printer’s gamut. Otherwise, you’ll be tossing the dice by letting Photoshop and your printer driver collaborate to convert the colors. Most often, that works fine, but if you want complete control over the color in your printed image, it’s best to do this work yourself.
By now you’ve probably figured out that printing is a lot more complex than you ever realized. In addition to the color-management settings we’ve just looked at, you’ll run into dozens of print settings in various dialogs: the Page Setup dialog, Photoshop’s own Print dialog, and the system print dialog, which is where you’ll find settings specific to your printer. In this section, we take a look at each of those locations and attempt to make sense of all the options each one offers.
If you have more than one printer available, be sure that you’ve made the one you intend to use active in the Page Setup dialog. You’ll find Page Setup at the bottom of Photoshop’s File menu, along with two other print-related commands: Print, which enables you to make all your print settings, and Print One Copy, which does just that. It immediately sends the current image to the printer, no questions asked, printing to the selected printer with whatever settings were used on the last photo. Let’s start with Page Setup; Figure 23.5 shows its dialog.
Each printer’s Page Setup dialog looks a little different (and, of course, Mac and Windows Page Setup dialogs look different), but they provide the same basic functions. (Note that not all options are available in every situation.) A Page Setup dialog generally displays the following information and options:
Printer—. The name of the printer always appears somewhere in the dialog. If it’s not the one you want to use, you can usually pick a different printer from a pop-up menu.
Properties—. On Windows computers, you can click this button to access a dialog where you can change options such as paper size, layout, printer resolution, and halftone settings.
Paper Size—. This pop-up menu enables you to specify the size of the paper on which you’re printing. You’ll generally find a good selection of standard U.S. and European paper sizes, including letter, legal, A4, tabloid, and various envelope sizes.
Source—. If your printer has multiple paper trays or gives you a choice of either using the paper tray or feeding one sheet at a time, often you can choose the paper source for the printer to use in Page Setup.
Orientation—. This setting determines how the printed image is placed on the page: portrait (the page’s height is the larger dimension) or landscape (the page’s width is the larger dimension).
Scale—. If you want the image to print smaller or larger, adjust this percentage downward or upward, as appropriate.
Note: Too Big?
If your image is too big to fit on the specified paper size, you won’t find out until later, when you actually click the Print button (we’ll get there in the next section). At that point, Photoshop tells you that your picture won’t fit and offers two choices: print anyway, resulting in only part of the image being printed, or cancel and adjust the Scale value so that the whole image fits on the page.
Now let’s take a look at the Print dialog (see Figure 23.6). Back in Photoshop CS3, Adobe rolled the features that used to live in a special Print with Preview dialog into the regular Print dialog, so there’s a lot going on here. Notice that you can change printers at the top of the dialog, and you can also return to the Page Setup dialog by clicking the Page Setup button.
The first thing to do in the Print dialog is choose the printer that you want to use and set the number of copies you’d like to print. Then things get more interesting. Next you can choose from the options in the Position area. If you uncheck the Center Image box, which is turned on by default, you’ll be able to move the picture around on the page by dragging it in the preview area on the left or by entering different Top and Left position values, placing the picture wherever you want on the printed page. If you drag a corner of the image preview, you can scale it, just as you would when using the Free Transform command; the values in the Scaled Print Size area change accordingly as you drag. You can also resize the image by typing a number into the Scale percentage field, relative to the original image size. If you have a photo that’s 6 inches wide and you want it to print 9 inches wide, for example, scale it to 150%. Of course, you can also change the Scale percentage in the Page Setup dialog.
A pop-up menu at the top of the right side of the Print dialog enables you to choose between Output options and Color Management options. As you change Output settings, you can see your changes in the preview area. In Figure 23.7, I’ve added corner crop marks, center crop marks, calibration bars, and a label (the filename) to my photo.
Here are some of the options in the Output section and what they mean:
Calibration Bars—. Check this box to have Photoshop print calibration and color bars next to your image. A calibration bar is a row of 11 gray squares ranging from 0% (white) to 100% (black) and including every 10% increment in between. A color bar is a row of 11 colors, including the RGB and CMYK colors. These bars can help when you’re trying to match a specific printer; this option is available only if you’re using a PostScript printer.
Registration Marks—. Activate this feature to print registration marks at the corners of the image. These marks are primarily used for aligning color separations, so you won’t need them if you’re printing to a desktop printer.
Corner Crop Marks—. Corner crop marks appear at each corner of your image, defining where it should be trimmed. They’re plain horizontal and vertical lines along which you can line up your straight-edge to cut a straight line along the edge of the picture.
Center Crop Marks—. These crop marks are centered on each side of the image, defining the sides’ center. Figure 23.8 shows the crop marks that were added to the image by the settings shown in Figure 23.7.
Description—. When you check this box, any text in the Description field of the File Info dialog for that file is added to the printed page. (To add Description info, choose File, File Info and make sure that Description is selected in the top pop-up menu.) This can be helpful for providing contact info, copyright data, or other details relevant to the image.
Labels—. This check box prints the filename below the picture. And if you’re printing color separations, the name of the appropriate color channel is also printed on each color plate.
Emulsion Down—. This setting prints your image as a horizontal mirror image of the original, with everything flipped left to right. Use this setting when you’re printing on T-shirt transfer paper so that the image faces the right way when it’s transferred to the shirt. The setting actually refers to whether a film negative reads forward with the film’s coated side up or down, but you need to worry about that only if you’re producing film color separations to be converted to a printing plate.
Negative—. With this option checked, the printer reverses the values of the image. That is, the whites become black, the blacks become white, and everything in between changes accordingly. You end up with a negative image, just like a photographic film negative. As with Emulsion Down, this option is relevant only if you’re printing to film for commercial offset printing, because these images usually need to be negatives.
Background—. If you want to print a background color around your image, click the Background button and Photoshop brings up the standard Color Picker. The color you pick is used only for printing; it doesn’t change the actual image file. (If you’re printing from Windows, be sure to turn off this feature after you use it. Otherwise, the background will appear around the next picture you print as well.) Be careful about using this feature with an inkjet printer; it uses up quite a lot of ink very quickly!
Border—. To add a border to your printed image, click the Border button. In the Border dialog, you can set the width of the printed border, which is always black, in inches, millimeters, or points. (As with Background, using this feature doesn’t affect the actual image file.)
Bleed—. Bleeding means that part of the image runs right off the edge of the paper, with no empty space between the image and the edge of the page. (This feature won’t work on every printer, because some printers can’t print to the very edge of a page. Check your printer’s manual to find out if your printer can produce bleed prints.)
Click the Bleed button to define how much of the image bleeds off the page in inches, millimeters, or points. Higher values move the crop marks within the boundaries of the image so that less of the image is printed. The maximum bleed value is an eighth of an inch (.125”).
Screen—. The Use Printer’s Default Screens box is checked by default, and as long as it’s checked, you won’t be able to change anything else in the Halftone Screen dialog. Uncheck this option if you want to customize the other halftone options to change the fineness and angle of the grid that determines placement of halftone dots. Most of the time, Photoshop’s default settings work fine; this is another setting you need to worry about only if you’re outputting an image for commercial printing.
Transfer—. This dialog allows you to compensate for dot gain, the increase in halftone dot size that takes place when ink spreads out on the paper. Depending on the printer or printing press and the paper being used, a 50% dot, for example, could print as a 58% dot, producing an 8% dot gain. In this case, you can use the Transfer Functions dialog to reduce the size of 50% dots in the printout so that they’ll be the right size for 50% dots after the ink spreads out. You can specify up to 13 grayscale values to create a customized transfer function. Transfer functions apply only when you’re outputting an image for commercial printing—if you’re using a home/office inkjet printer, you needn’t worry about dot gain—and they apply only during printing; they don’t affect the image itself.
Interpolation—. Interpolation refers to a printer’s capability to resample an image as it prints it. Any PostScript Level 2 (or higher) printer can resample a low-resolution image on the fly to produce a better-quality printout. This feature is valuable only if you’re dealing with low-resolution images, and it’s available only with PostScript printers.
Figure 23.7 shows the additional options I’ve selected in the Print dialog box. Figure 23.8 shows the resulting output.
Before you continue, make sure that whatever you want to print is visible in the image window. By default, Photoshop prints all visible layers and channels, but it skips any that you have hidden. If you want to print only certain layers or channels, hide all the other layers or channels before printing.
The Color Management options are fewer and simpler:
Print—. Choose Document for normal printing; choose Proof if you want to try to match the way your image would look when printed on an output device other than your own (such as a four-color printing press). Either way, Photoshop uses the device profiles specified in the Color Settings dialog box.
Options—. In the Color Handling pop-up menu, choose whether you want the color managed by Photoshop, by your printer, or not at all. If you choose Photoshop, specify a device profile that matches your printer. Leave the Rendering Intent pop-up menu set on Perceptual for the closest visual match in colors.
Now you’re finally getting around to printing the image; there’s just one more dialog to get through. Click Print to see yet another Print dialog (see Figure 23.9). The first thing you’ll probably notice is that, like the Page Setup dialog, this dialog looks different depending on what printer you have, what platform you’re running on, and the color mode of the image. However, you need to supply the same information regardless of the Print dialog’s appearance.
Let’s look at some of the Print fields and options you might see (you might need to look through multiple panes of the Print dialog to find all these):
Copies—. Enter the number of copies of the image that you want to print.
Pages—. You can choose the range of pages in a document to be printed. Of course, this setting is irrelevant in Photoshop because its documents consist of only one page.
Media Type—. The printer driver needs to know what kind of paper or transparency film you’re printing on. This setting determines how much ink the printer applies, because different kinds of paper are more or less absorbent.
Ink—. You can generally choose Color or Black; black ink and toner cartridges are cheaper than color ones, so it’s often a good idea to use just black ink for early drafts.
Print Quality (also sometimes called Mode)—. You can often specify a printer resolution using this pop-up menu, such as 300 or 600 dpi. Some printers use Best, Normal, Econofast, or some variation on this theme, as well as or instead of a specific dpi setting.
Destination—. You can print to a printer, obviously, but you can also print to a file. This means saving the printed output as a PostScript, EPS, or PDF file (see Figure 23.10). (This option works only if you’re using a PostScript-compatible printer or if you’re running Mac OS X, which has PDF capability built into the system.)
Print Selected Area—. When you have an active rectangular selection in your Photoshop image window, you can check this box (labeled Selection in Windows) to print just that area. This works only with rectangular selections created with the Marquee tool, and it doesn’t work for feathered selections.
Encoding (or you might just see a check box for ASCII format)—. Here you tell Photoshop which encoding method to use when it sends the image data to a PostScript printer. All PostScript printers understand ASCII, so it’s always a safe bet. Binary encoding is more compressed, so it can be faster, but older printers occasionally choke on it. JPEG encoding is even faster, but it results in some loss of data because it’s a lossy compression scheme. JPEG encoding works only with PostScript Level 2 printers (or above).
Print In—. Here you may be able to decide how to print the image: in grayscale, in RGB colors, or in CMYK colors. For some desktop printers, RGB gives better results. (If you have a choice, by all means, try both options and see which looks better to you.)
Print Separations—. If the image is currently in CMYK or Duotone mode and the composite color channel is active, you might see this option. Checking this box tells Photoshop to print each channel as a separate color plate. A CMYK document would print as four separate pages, one for all the cyan data in the image, one for magenta, one for yellow, and one for black. Each page is labeled with the name of the color it represents.
Options—. Oddly, Options isn’t always one of your options. On a non-PostScript printer, such as the Hewlett-Packard DeskJet series, the Options button is one of your choices in the Print dialog. Options usually lets you make settings such as Intensity, Halftoning, and Color Matching. Leave all three at Auto unless you’re printing a photograph. If you are, choose Photographic or a similar setting from the Color Matching menu to get the best color reproduction.
Caution: Your Mileage May Vary...
Each printer is slightly different, as are its dialogs. I’ve covered some of the most common print settings here, but your printer might not have some of these, and it might have settings I haven’t mentioned. Be sure to read your printer manual before you start printing; it’s your best source for specific printing info.
When everything is set to your satisfaction, click Print to send your image to your printer.
What you print an image on makes almost as much difference as how you do the printing. You can get various types and weights of paper for all kinds of printers, including special papers both for inkjet printers and for laser printers. If you want your picture to resemble a photograph, consider investing in photo-weight glossy paper. It’s a much thicker paper than regular office paper, with a glossy surface that really does help make your inkjet- or laser-printed picture look as though it came out of a real darkroom instead of from a computer. You’ll get spectacular color and detail with this kind of paper, too.
You can also get matte coated papers for printing color on inkjet printers. And transparency paper is clear acetate film, specially treated to accept the inks. Use it to make overhead projection slides and overlays.
You can also get art papers for some kinds of inkjet printers. These are heavy rag papers, much like artist’s watercolor paper. Find these at www.inkjetmall.com, among other places. These fine-art papers, including some made from bamboo and others with a wide variety of surface finishes, are ideally suited to printing pictures that you’ve converted to imitation watercolors, pastel drawings, and so on, because they’re the same kind of papers generally used for those techniques. If you do print on a heavy art paper, be sure to feed in one sheet at a time and set the printer for thicker paper (if it has that option).
For some kinds of art projects, printing on canvas or even foil is ideal. You can order treated pieces of thin canvas with a paper backing that go through the printer very well; this stuff will run you about a dollar a letter-sized sheet. There are also foils, fuzzy paper, window cling plastic, and all kind of other materials treated to accept inkjet ink; you’ll find a good selection at the Crafty PC website (www.thecraftypc.com/funpapers.html). You can even buy sheets of rice paper or sugar, as well as edible inks, and put your photos on cakes or cookies. (Check out www.computercakes.com or www.icingimages.com to find these materials.)
Tip: Paper Matters
I use inexpensive all-purpose office paper for most of my work. It’s fine for printing a quick proof to see how a picture is coming along. For serious proofing, though, you need to use the same paper that you’ll use for the final print. Otherwise, you don’t know for sure that the combination works. For work that a client will see, I use a coated inkjet paper because the colors are brighter and don’t bleed into each other. If I want the picture to look like a darkroom photo, I’ll pay the extra money to print it on special glossy paper.
Label stocks, of course, come in all kinds of sizes and shapes, and hundreds, if not thousands, of kinds and weights of paper for both inkjet and laser printers. Finally, you can buy iron-on transfer paper (for color laser or inkjet printers), which lets you put your images on T-shirts, aprons, tote bags, or anything else that you can fit under an iron. Be sure that you follow the instructions with the paper, and don’t forget to flip your image before you print it so that it reads correctly when it’s transferred to its final destination.
Printing directly from Photoshop doesn’t happen as often as you might think. Most of the time, images created in Photoshop are imported into another application for final placement and output. Most often these are page-layout applications, such as InDesign and QuarkXPress. Photoshop images can even be brought into other image-editing or drawing applications, such as Painter and Illustrator, and printed from there with additions made in the new program, such as type or vector illustrations.
Perhaps you edit a newsletter, or you do Flash movies or PowerPoint presentations. Maybe you’ve shot a pile of product photos to go into a catalog. The question is, how do you move them from Photoshop into another application? It’s not difficult; the other programs do the importing. All you have to do is save your images in a compatible format and put them in a folder that you can easily locate when the time comes.
The main thing you’ll need to watch out for when you’re printing Photoshop images from other applications is the format in which you save your files. Other than that, any settings related to the image, such as custom colors or halftone screens, are brought with the image automatically. The right format to choose for anything that will end up as printed matter depends on whether the final product is being printed on a Postscript or non-Postscript printer. To print on a Postscript printer, save your image files in PDF, DCS, or EPS format. For non-Postscript printers, use TIFF when you’re planning to place the picture in another file.
PowerPoint supports most graphics formats, but GIF (for line art such as logos, charts, and graphs) and JPEG (for photos) are the most compact and best suited for screen display. How you insert the picture depends on whether you’re using a preformatted page or making one up as you go along. You can pick out a slide layout for your new slide (see Figure 23.11) and then choose the picture to go into it, as in Figure 23.12.
You can also just begin with a blank slide and place your photo on it. To do this, you use the same dialog box as in Figure 23.11.
To insert a picture into a Microsoft Word document, choose Insert, Picture (as shown in Figure 23.13) and navigate to the picture you want to use. It opens in a box that you can move around in your document or resize as needed to fit your layout. The picture has been copied in to the Word document and isn’t linked to the original.
Adding pictures to desktop publishing documents works a little bit differently. Instead of inserting the images in the document you’re creating, you add a link to them from the document you assemble in the DTP program. This means that, to keep your pictures where they belong, you can’t move or rename any image after it has been placed. If you do, you break the link, which just means that you have to go back and tell your program where the file is now. If I’m creating something like a newsletter or ad that might have several images in it, I keep them all in one folder and make sure that the folder goes to the print shop along with the InDesign or Word files.
Typically, in a desktop publishing program such as Adobe InDesign, the command to insert a picture is Place, and you’ll find it on the File menu. Other than that, the procedure is much the same as in a word processor: Navigate to the image you want to use and (in InDesign) click the page to place it. In QuarkXPress, you’ll need to draw a box to contain the picture first, but that’s the only real difference. When the picture is on the page, you can scale it, move it, give it a border, and wrap type around it.
Printing Photoshop images isn’t difficult; there are just a lot of decisions to make along the way. However, once you get into a routine of printing, you’ll find yourself making most of those decisions automatically. During this hour, we discussed those choices, from preparing an image for printing, to setting up the page, and finally setting the printing options. The wonderful thing about printing is that if you don’t get a gorgeous printout the first time, you can just change your settings and try again—provided that you have enough paper and ink, of course.
Using Photoshop pictures in other applications is also very simple: Just save them in an appropriate format and then use the other program’s method of importing them.
PaperDirect is a company that sells more different kinds of papers for more purposes than you can possibly imagine. Visit its website (www.paperdirect.com) to see how to get a sample kit of its papers and envelopes. You’ll love the preprinted brochures, cards, and other papers that you can customize with your own type and images. Other companies sell this sort of merchandise as well, but I’ve found that PaperDirect has the best combination of high quality and a good selection.
Take a field trip to your local computer store or to a good office supply store (or try a scrapbooking store!) to see what kinds of papers they have for your printer. Also check out art supply stores for unusual papers, such as canvas-textured, silk, and watercolor. Treat yourself to a package or two of high-quality paper and try printing some of your best work. Note how image colors and the overall effect change when you use different papers to print the same picture.