Transcript:
Hi, old. Joshua Hocker, here, wild nature photo travel and today. I’m going to do a short video on soft proofing image, sizing and image sharpening for print. And this is my own workflow. It’s how I go about making a print once. I’ve got a file that I that I’m ready to commit to paper and I do it in Photoshop, So I do all my printing out of the Photoshop. It’s just the way. I’ve always done it. I know you can do it in, like three more various other programs, but for me. Photoshop works really, really well and the process is very simple. What I want to do is. I want to show you how I saw proof the image and so that I know what it’s going to look like before I commit ink to paper, and that’s a very important step because ink and paper are expensive. Ink, especially is more than some of the most expensive whiskeys. So you don’t want to waste it, so if you can accurately predict, and you can accurately predict how the image is going to look before ink, it’s paper, you can serve yourself a lot of time, hassle and money, and I’m going to show you how to do that, and we’re going to use the same image that I did a short video on just before on processing video of this wolf young wolf that I photographed in Finland in autumn in September last year in 2019 And we’re gonna make a print so here we are now we’re in Photoshop. This is the finished TIFF file, really – as it’s finished, so it’s basically processed. Now ready to either make an export for the web or in this case, make a print, so in order to sort the image we’re going to go into view. Do you proof set up custom okay in Photoshop, and then that’s going to pop a dialog here where we can select the device. We want to simulate so in this case we’re going to we’re going to use the profile for Somerset Museum Rag, which is a paper by Moab, Legion paper by an Moab. It’s actually my favorite printing paper. It’s a beautiful, soft paper, matte paper, very supple and soft surface texture just works wonderfully for this type of photograph. So this is where? I’m going to select the profile that I want to use, so I’ve got Canon Pro 1000 printer Moab, Somerset Museum Rag, just a heavyweight fine art paper, the proof profile. I made with the Xride Isis. Excel 4d 50 lighting conditions and support file made last year. So this is still my current profile and the next thing to note in the drop-down is that we have rendering intent and there are four selections in here. The ones you really want to be concerned, concern yourself with either relative colorimetric or perceptual. These are the two that relate to photography or at least the most relevant saturation and absolute color metric, really not suitable for the sort of work that I’m doing. So as I flip between these, you’ll notice the image changes, so it gets brighter or it dims down a little bit, but that’s a result of how the profile is dealing with the colors in the image, so I know from this image that all the colors are going to be in gamut. That is that the printer will be able to print all of the color that’s in this file, and if you’ve got an image like that, where all the color fits, you know, inside the gamut of the printer, usually the correct rendering term will be relative colorimetric because you have no reason to deal with out of gamut color. If you have an image that has a lot of very heavily saturated or deeply saturated color, you may need to look at using perceptual which really the difference between them from a gamut perspective. Is that if you have any colors that are out of gamut, relative colorimetric will basically just cut them off, it won’t be able to print themselves, just cuts them off and ignores them. If you use the perceptual rendering intent, those out of gamut colors will be remapped into gamut and everything else inside the inside that the the printer’s colorspace will also be moved, so you can end up with tonal shifts by using the perceptual rendering intent, so it’s very easy to quickly. Flip between them to see the differences in this case. I’m going to use relative colorimetric. We want to simulate paper color and simulate black ink, and then we can preview it, so here’s the image now as it’s finished the TIFF file ready to print, but here’s the image as it’s going to print. Well as you can see, there’s some differences there. They’re not great, but there’s definitely certain some contrast missing from the image and a little bit of saturation as well so this has been referred to this preview button as they make my image Look like crap button in the past. I’ve seen it referred to this way Because in effect, it’s simulating what the image is going to look like when in hits paper and that’s important difference because the images were looking at it here on the screen as I’m talking between. Them is backlit with a much higher contrast ratio than what we’re going to see from ink on paper. So in this case, we are going to have to correct for that. So what are we going to do? Well, the first thing I like to do is make sure this is turned on, and then what we’re going to do is we’re going to create a duplicate. So we’re gonna go to image duplicate now. You can’t do this with a new view. You because anything you do to. The new to the new image will also be done to the other one. You need to do this with a duplicate, but this is just a throwaway file, so we’ll create a duplicate and then we’re going to lay them up side by side so window arranged tile to up vertical, and now we have our two files, so we have the file on the Left. Which is the original TIFF file? Ready to ready to to work with, and then we have the soft proofing file on the right here, And this basically shows how the image will look as say when ink it’s paper, so in order to make the image on the right look like the image on the Left, we’re gonna have to make a few small adjustments. So the way I like to do this, is I. Have these saved up as actions just to save myself some time, and I have one here. That is basically a-level’s action just to create a levels layout. You need to make sure you have that. The soft proof can be selected here, so creating your levels layer. I’m going to set this to luminosity for the blending mode because I don’t want to create any color shifts, and then what I’m going to do is I’m just going to set my black point for a little bit of black clipping just to put some contrast back in the image and also my white point so very subtle changes, but as I toggle that on and off, you can see how much contrast that’s adding back in and how much closer it is now to the image on the right hand side on left hand side rather, so it’s really just about tweaking this. Okay, and then I’m going to add a saturation layer as well your saturation and I’m just gonna add about seven or eight points of saturation So that now as I toggle my layers off, so there’s an image if I do nothing. The image on the right is how it will print, but I wanted to print like on the left, but were those two small adjustments? You can see now. I’ve got a very, very close match. Almost identical, in fact, really hard-pressed to see any difference between the two images, so that’s? Those two tweaks to this photograph will make a much much better print. And then I can get rid of the duplicate. I don’t need that anymore. That was just there as a reference for me, so I can close that we don’t need to save it, and now we have our file ready to to make a print, so we need to size it correctly now in this case. I’m going to make a 16 inch print on 13 by 19 inch Somerset Museum rag paper, so I’ll go to image image size and I’ll set my width to 16 inches at 300 pixels per inch, and then I will sharpen the image for print. Now I capture sharper this image, and I showed how I did that in my earlier video, but now what we’re going to do is. We’re actually going to sharpen it specifically for print. Now there’s many ways you can do this. I like to use a plugin by pixel genius called photo keyed sharpener. It used to be a paid. Sorry, if you can hear the lorikeets in the background there, they’re going nuts outside my office window At the moment it used to be a paid application. The photo keyed sharpener. But now now it’s free from pixel genius, so you can jump over to their website and download it free and it’s fantastic for print shopping. The process is actually fully automated. And, actually, if you’re doing your sharpening in Lightroom, you’re using this plugin for picture genius without knowing it. Because that’s the mechanics under the hood of Lightroom is using photo kit sharpener. So you access it in Photoshop through file automate photo kit output sharpener and it will find automatically the the size of the image and also the paper type, matte or glossy. Now it’s important to have that set correctly because they need different amounts of sharpening whether it’s a matte or glossy paper, and obviously you want to set inkjet printers for the for the for the shopping because we’re not using contour or half ternal, in fact, that second jet and then format paper and as you can see, it’s already picked up the size and everything down here, and then we just literally hit. OK, and that will apply the sharpening as a new layer. Now it’s important to should be noted, it’s impossible to note to judge print sharpening on screen. It’s not like judging the image at 100% once you capture, sharpen it. You really need to make a print, but if you’ve done your. Captcha sharpening correctly, and you have optimally sharpened at the image. Then the output sharpening that is applied in this plugin will also be optimal. That is really the key to the puzzle with print sharpening. You’ve got to get your Captcha sharpening right and then your output sharpening if you use this. Plug-in will also be perfect and that’s it we’re ready to now make a print and it’s important to note now that we’ve sized this specifically to make a printed 16 inches on the long edge, so we’re printing it on 13 by 19 inch paper on Moab, Somerset Museum Rag, which is just as I say, beautifully soft, superb paper for for this type of image really is my favorite paper so to make a print now we’ll just go to file print, and we need to go through some dialogue here, so I’ll just go through this fairly quickly. We want to the color handling. Photoshop manages colors, and we want to select the same printer profile that we made the soft proof with this is really important that place where it’s very easy to go wrong. If you need to make sure that you’re using the same profile that you soft proofed the image with otherwise, you’re going to get a different result. Obviously, you want to use 16-bit. We’re using the relative colorimetric rendering intent with black point compensation and then in the print settings, This is for the Canon Pro 1000 that I’m printing on. I’ve got a preset set up for some set Museum rag in 83 plus, and I’m just going to check. I’ve got my quality and media set correctly heavyweight, find out paper, manual feed highest quality and save that and hit print and away we go, we get our print and we’ll get a print that really closely matches What we see here on the screen and this is my. This has been my workflow now for making prints for many many years doing the soft proofing this way in Photoshop, I find gives me very, very accurate screen to print matches. Now it will never match completely because the printer’s frontlet, with a much lower contrast ratio than the backlit screen, but it can be extremely close using this method. And I find this works very very well for me. It’s also quite quick, took to accomplish as well. I guess it should be noted that one of the real piece to the puzzle when it comes to printing is the quality of the profile that you use, so you really need to make sure that you are using a custom-made high quality profile made by somebody who knows what doing because if you are using care profiles, it’s been my experience that there’s sub-optimal. Most of the time they’re made on somebody else’s printer under their conditions, and you really don’t know what those conditions were when the profile was made. So you’re far better off having a profile made for you. Find one or two peoples that you like and stick with them in my case. I really love Somerset Museum Rag. That’s my go-to paper when I want to make a print and I’d say probably 98% of the prints. I do are made on that paper if I need a glass paper. I’ll go to the mall and juniper, which is a beright paper and which is a glossy, fine art paper. But most of the time I’m on Somerset Museum rag. And so I’ve spent a lot of time making sure my profile for that is really optimal, and that’s it. That’s how I soft proofed my images, size them and print them. If you’ve got any questions or queries on that, you can leave me a note in the comments below and subscribe for further updates.