What You’ll Learn in This Hour:
<objective>The different color systems used for printing images
</objective> <objective>The best printer for your needs
</objective> <objective>How to prepare your pictures for printing
</objective> <objective>How to print studio-style picture packages of a single image
</objective> <objective>How to print contact sheets for cataloging or reviewing multiple photos at once
</objective> </feature>Once upon a time, all photos got printed. These days, you’re just as likely to email a photo to a friend, create an online gallery, or put your photos on a DVD as you are to print them. Still, the printer isn’t on the way out just yet. Hey, framed pictures of the kids? Grandma’s favorite birthday gift and they’re inexpensive, too!
But there’s more to getting a good print than just clicking the Print button. Much depends on the printer you use, the supplies you load it up with, and how you prepare your photos for printing.
The first thing to remember about color is that there’s more than one way to reproduce colors. On your monitor screen, lighted picture elements combine red, green, and blue (RGB) in different proportions to display different colors. On paper, however, you need to mix colored inks to produce color, and those inks are cyan (light blue), magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK). If you think about it, it’s easy to see that these colored inks might not produce exactly the same range of colors as red, green, and blue light. The range of colors a color system can reproduce is called a gamut, and CMYK has a very different gamut from RGB (see Figure 9.1).
This all sounds very dry and academic until you realize that the pictures you’re looking at onscreen in Photoshop Elements are all in RGB mode and need to be converted to CMYK to be printed on your printer. Now, this isn’t something you need to do yourself—the printer takes care of this on its own. But you do need to use color management to help make that translation as accurate as possible.
You can tell generally which colors don’t translate well between RGB and CMYK (such as bright blue) by looking at the gamuts in the color version of Figure 9.1. When printing a really bright blue color, magazines and newspapers actually use a separate, blue ink on top of the usual cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks (which are referred to as process inks). For your own printing, however, you need to tell Photoshop Elements about the color gamut of your particular printer. You do that by providing it with a color profile, a data file that lays out the exact color characteristics of your printer.
Wait just one minute, you’re saying. What about this HSB model we talked about in Hour 6, “Making Quick Fixes”? Hey, good memory. Hue/Saturation/Brightness is a color mode and is used in the Photoshop Elements color picker, so where does it fit in? Well, you already know the answer to this question, in a way. HSB isn’t a way of reproducing color, like RGB and CMYK; it’s a way of defining colors. Think of it this way: HSB, RGB, and CMYK are different languages. If you want to talk about love, you speak French. But if you want to discuss computers or compose an opera, you use English or Italian. Similarly, if you’re describing colors to a monitor or a television, you need to speak RGB, whereas printers speak CMYK. Meanwhile, because Photoshop Elements speaks both RGB and HSB, you can use the very useful HSB model to define colors, and Photoshop Elements turns them into RGB to display them onscreen.
If you already have a printer and you’re not planning to get a new one anytime soon, you can skip this section and move right to “Printing the Page.” But if you’re curious about the different types of printers available these days and want to know more about how they work, how much they cost, and what situations they’re best for, stick with me.
After you’ve read this section, if you’re in the market for a printer, I suggest that you get on the Web and check out a few sites such as cnet.com and epinions.com. The former is, in the publisher’s words, a cornucopia of “tech product reviews, tech news, daily videos, and free downloads.” When I’m about to buy a new piece of hardware, from a cell phone to a widescreen monitor, this is the first place I go to read up on the editor’s picks for the best values. Epinions.com, on the other hand, is all about user reviews—so after you buy your printer and have used it for a while, feel free to go back and post your own review of the model you ended up with.
Printers come in several different categories based on their size and feature sets, completely apart from the actual printing technology they use. Here are a few types of printers you’re likely to see on the market:
Personal printers, both inkjet and laser, are on the small side and tend to be less expensive than printers optimized for printing photos. If you have to use your printer for photos and for everyday printing, this is probably what you want.
Photo printers are usually inkjet printers with printing technologies and inks designed to provide the best possible image reproduction. They might not do so well at printing plain text clearly, but for photos they can’t be beat.
Snapshot printers are small inkjets or dye sublimation printers that use specially sized and formulated paper to make photo prints. You can’t use them for any other kind of printing, but they do make borderless prints that you don’t have to trim to size.
Portable printers, usually inkjets, don’t offer the best image quality, but they’re tiny and lightweight, perfect for making quick prints at business or social events.
Multifunction devices combine the functions of a copier, scanner, printer, and fax machine in one machine. They’re jacks of all trades, and possibly masters of none, but they can’t be beat for convenience.
Now let’s take a look at the different printer technologies you’ll run into while printer shopping.
The most inexpensive and most versatile printers you’ll run across are inkjet models (see Figure 9.2). These printers spray tiny droplets of colored ink onto the surface of the paper to create a printed image. Like commercial printing presses, they use cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks, but some printers add other ink colors for better results. Most commonly, you’ll see printers that use a light magenta and a light cyan in addition to the usual four inks. Some manufacturers, such as Canon, make inkjet printers that use green and red or orange inks to increase the gamut of colors that they can reproduce.
Inkjet printers are often not network capable; they most often use USB to connect to your printer, although I’m starting to see some with Bluetooth wireless connectivity.
You’re most likely to run into this technology among snapshot printers (see Figure 9.3). Don’t be misled by the term snapshot—dye-sub printers provide some of the best color reproduction out there and are often used for high-end color proofing in the publishing industry. They work by heating solid inks until they turn into a gas and sink into the special paper, and then solidify again.
These are image printers, not something you can use for printing letters and memos, so they’re usually not the best bet for someone who can afford only one printer. But if you’re looking for top-notch photo prints, look to a dye-sub.
Until recently, color laser printers were expensive behemoths that you’d find at Kinko’s, not something you’d consider for home use. Well, guess what? Times have changed (see Figure 9.4).
Color lasers can now be had for much less than $500—in fact, check out the Samsung CLP-300, with a street price of less than $200. As with black-and-white laser printers, they’re smaller than they used to be. Because of their speed and the high capacity of their paper trays, color laser printers are great for printing flyers and business graphics. You won’t find their photo print quality as good as with inkjet or dye-sub printers, but if speed is more important to you than getting a perfect print, you’ll want to consider a color laser.
You’ve got your printer, it’s all hooked up, your computer recognizes it, and you’re almost ready to print. You need to take care of just a few more things before you get started. First, you need to set up Photoshop Elements’ color management. Then you need to make sure you have the right inks and paper (or other medium).
Ink is expensive, that’s for sure. In fact, printer companies such as Canon, Epson, and Hewlett-Packard sell their printers at rock-bottom prices just so that they can then sell you their expensive inks for years to come. Unfortunately, there’s really no way to get off the ink train. You can buy inexpensive third-party inks, true, but they might not work well with your printer. I once spent weeks trying to track down the source of a nasty green cast in all my prints, only to find that it was the off-brand ink I’d been using. The problem disappeared immediately when I switched back to the printer manufacturer’s ink. The same caveat goes for ink cartridge refill kits and for paper; I recommend sticking with manufacturers’ inks at all times and choosing paper very carefully. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for.
The first thing you need to do when you’re setting up to print is make sure Photoshop Elements’ color management is turned on so that the program will use all its wiles to make your printouts look good. This is a one-time thing; you don’t need to do it every time you print. Follow these steps:
Choose Edit, Color Settings (see Figure 9.5).
Choose a color management option:
No Color Management—. If you intend to allow your printer to handle the color management, leave this option on. I’ve found that my Epson inkjet’s color management is pretty good, so I usually stick with this option. When I want to really optimize my printouts, though, I use Photoshop Elements’ color management with one of the following options.
Always Optimize Colors for Computer Screens—. This is the appropriate setting for people who create nothing but web graphics and photos to share online. Because we’re printing in this chapter, let’s skip right over this setting.
Always Optimize Colors for Printing—. If you print every picture, this is the setting for you. I don’t do that, though, and I’m betting you don’t, either. Which leads us to ...
Allow Me to Choose—. Here’s the one you want if you sometimes print, but not always. If a photo already contains color profile information, this setting uses that information to display the file. If not, you can choose which profile you want Photoshop Elements to add to the file: Adobe RGB for pictures you plan to print or sRGB for pictures that will probably be screen only.
After this, any time you save a file, make sure that ICC Profile is checked in the Save As dialog. If it’s not, the appropriate color profile won’t be added to the file.
Now you’re ready to go load up your printer with the paper or other medium you’ve chosen. And you do have a lot of choices. Of course, most of the time you’ll just want to print on paper, and for that I recommend spending the bucks for the good stuff. That means name-brand paper specifically designed for the kind of print you’re going for. You’ll want the extra-smooth, extra-white inkjet printer paper for drafts, and glossy or matte photo paper for final prints. If you’ve never tried photo paper, do give it a whirl; you’ll be amazed by the quality of the prints.
On the other hand, if you’re feeling crafty, you can print on all kinds of things besides regular printer paper. First, of course, there’s art paper, such as the kind watercolor painters use. Then there are all kinds of specialty items, such as cotton and silk fabric, shrinking plastic, rice paper for placing on cakes, water-slide decals, stickers, and, of course, iron-on transfers. The range of products you can buy these days that will accept an iron-on transfer is just stunning. Want to make your own mouse pads, coasters, or placemats? No problem!
No matter what medium you’re using, be sure to read and follow the printing instructions that came with it. With transfer media such as iron-ons, you generally need to choose a high quality level to maximize the amount of ink that’s deposited on the printing surface; this, in turn, maximizes the amount of ink that can be transferred to the object you’re ironing on. The media you’re using might have other requirements; be sure to check them out.
Printing a Single Photo
For the first printing task, let’s switch to the Editor. You can print a single photo from the Organizer, too, but regardless of the number of photos selected, you end up in the Print Photos dialog box, which is different from the Editor’s Print dialog box. We look at how to proceed from there in the next couple sections. For now, let’s move on with printing from the Editor.
Open the photo you want to print in the Editor. Make sure you’ve made all the changes that you want to the image and that you’ve opened the right version of the picture, if multiple versions exist.
Choose File, Print to open the Print dialog box (see Figure 9.6).
First, make sure the right device is shown in the Printer pop-up menu; then choose a Print Size option. If it’s important that the printout measure exactly what the Print Size is (if it must fit in a picture frame, for instance), click Crop to Fit Print Proportions. To see a box showing the edges of the picture, click Show Bounding Box. Of course, you also need to enter a number in the Copies field.
In the Position area, either check Center Image or uncheck it and set Top and Left values to position the image wherever you want it to be on the paper.
In the Scaled Print Size area, you can see how much Photoshop Elements is scaling the photo up or down to fit it into the print size you’ve chosen, along with the resulting resolution (pixels per inch). Make sure these settings are appropriate; if the resolution is less than 150ppi, you might not be happy with the print’s quality.
Make Output settings for any special requirements you have for this print: Add a Label (the filename or the caption from the Properties palette), a Border, or a Background color; choose Print Crop Marks to help you trim the print accurately; or click Flip Image if you’re printing to a transfer medium such as an iron-on.
In the Color Management section, choose Photoshop Elements Manages Color from the Color Handling menu. Then choose your printer from the Printer Profile menu and decide on a Rendering Intent setting, as follows:
Perceptual—. Choose this setting for a print that’s adjusted to look “correct” to human eyes. The colors maintain their relationships to each other, so if one or more colors are changed because they’re out of the printer’s gamut, all the colors in the image are changed.
Saturation—. Choose this setting if you want the print to have some extra oomph in the form of brighter colors.
Relative Colorimetric—. This setting leaves in-gamut colors alone and converts any out-of-gamut colors to their closest equivalents in the printer’s gamut.
Absolute Colorimetric—. If you want to simulate output from a different printer, this setting enables you to specify that printer’s profile and reproduce its output as closely as possible. It’s mostly for graphic arts geeks like me, so you’ll probably never need it.
Click Page Setup and make sure that the correct paper size and paper tray are shown (see Figure 9.7). Switch from Portrait to Landscape if you want to rotate the print to fit the wide way on the paper. Click OK when you’re done making settings.
Click Print and then click your way through one more dialog, the operating system’s Print dialog (see Figure 9.8). This is your last chance to switch printers or change the number of copies you print. Then click Print one last time, and you’re off to the races.
Making Contact Sheets
Traditional contact sheets are made by laying the exposed film directly onto photo paper to print it. For decades, contact sheets were the standard way to review the images from a roll of film to decide which ones were worth making larger prints of. They’re still useful for passing around a batch of pictures for review so that you can decide which images to use in your photo projects. To make contact sheets in Photoshop Elements, follow these steps:
If you’re in the Organizer, select the image or images you want to use and choose File, Print. In the Editor, choose File, Print Multiple Photos. No matter where you started, you end up in the same place (see Figure 9.9).
Look at the column on the left side of the Print Photos dialog and make sure that the right photos are included. To remove a photo, click its thumbnail and then click Remove at the bottom of the column; to add a photo, click Add, choose photos in the Add Photos dialog (see Figure 9.10), and click Done.
Make sure the printer you’re planning to use is chosen in the Select Printer pop-up menu. Because each printer has its own margin sizes, Photoshop Elements has to know what printer you’ll be using so that it can give you an accurate preview of the printout.
Choose Contact Sheet as the type of print you want to make.
Choose a number of columns from 1 to 9; the number you choose automatically determines the number of rows on a page.
If you want the photos to be labeled, click any of the boxes in the Add a Text Label section.
Click Page Setup to double-check your paper settings; then click OK.
Click More Options and choose your printer’s profile from the Print Space pop-up menu; then click OK.
Click Print.
Picture packages are Photoshop Elements’ version of those studio portrait packages that include a variety of sizes of the same photo. If this isn’t ringing a bell, cast your mind back to those school photos of years gone by—that’s right, like that. Printing a picture package is a very similar process to making a contact sheet, with just a few different options to set.
Start by choosing the picture or pictures you want to use. Then choose Print in the Organizer or Print Multiple Photos in the Editor. When you’re in the Print Photos dialog, choose Picture Package as the type of print, and then make sure the right photos are displayed in the left column. Now it’s time to set your picture package options (see Figure 9.11):
Layout—. These are the different size combinations available to you, ranging from a single 8″×10″ print per page to a page with 20 tiny squarish prints.
Frame—. If you’re in the mood for special effects, check out the options in this menu. I particularly like Brushed Antique Rectangle—Lady Bugs, not so much.
Fill Page with First Photo—. Check this oddly named box if you want to use the same picture for all the print sizes on each page, which, of course, will result in a multipage print job. Click the arrows below the preview to flip through the pages before you print.
Crop to Fit—. If this option is checked, Photoshop Elements crops the picture to completely fill each “slot” on the page. It’s most noticeable when you choose a print size whose proportions are very different from your photo’s. If you don’t need your prints to be the exact size of a picture frame, click this setting off and on a few times to see which version you prefer.
By the Way
Don’t panic if you see a dialog labeled Printing Warning when you first open the Print Photos dialog. It might tell you that some of your photos are too low resolution to be printed at the requested print size—but you haven’t chosen a print size yet! Photoshop Elements is assuming you’re going to use the same size you used the last time you printed pictures, and we all know what they say about assuming.
The Page Setup dialog and More Options dialog are the same for picture packages as they are for contact sheets; you won’t find any surprises there.
Printing your photos is faster, easier, and cheaper than ever, and you have a lot of printers to choose from. You don’t have to stick to printing on paper, either; all kinds of printer media enable you to do fun things with your pictures. In this hour, you learned how to set up Photoshop Elements’ color management, and you printed a single image and a contact sheet. In the next hour, we look at different ways to share your pictures online.
How long will color printouts last? Will they fade eventually? | |
Everything fades eventually, but with today’s archival-quality inks and good paper, your digital prints should last just as long as your traditional photo prints. For the latest and most comprehensive research on this issue, though, you really need to go to Wilhelm Imaging Research (www.wilhelm-research.com). | |
Can I print on my own fabric instead of the expensive precut sheets from the craft store? | |
Sure. You need two things in addition to your cotton or silk cloth: freezer paper, the kind with one waxed side, and a product called Bubble Jet Set (C. Jenkins Co., www.cjenkinscompany.com) that sets the image permanently on the fabric. You can find instructions for doing this all over the Web, but basically you soak your cloth in Bubble Jet Set, iron it onto the freezer paper, trim it to fit through the printer, and go! |
See if you can answer these quiz questions; then have some fun with your printer doing the activities.
Print the same photo several times, at different quality levels, on different paper, and with different color management settings. Compare the results and decide which prints look better; then record the settings and media you used for them.
Take a batch of similar photos of people or an attractive scene. Then print a contact sheet and pass it around for comments from your friends or family members. See if having the contact sheet in front of them makes people more likely to talk about what they do and don’t like in each photo.