Last week I completed work on a new mini-portfolio of images from the Iceland interior. I put them up on the website and have been living with them for the past week or so.

Over the week that i’ve been living with them, I’ve noticed things in the images that I didn’t see at first, so I decided to go and print them out. Well, I really should practice more of what I preach ! as I found quite a few problems with the images that weren’t quite evident on screen.

To name a few issues that I never notice on screen, but always become apparent in the print:

dust spots, or distractions in the image, such as some sudden tonality change either right in the middle of the composition or at the very edge.
Colour casts. In the instance of the images you see here, I noticed patches of deep blue that weren’t evident on the monitor. What I always find fascinating about noticing colour casts in the actual prints, is that once I see them there - I now see them on the monitor.
Overall composition errors. The image may feel balanced on the monitor, but once printed out, certain objects or tones within the frame of the image become more prominent. Perhaps an area of the picture has too much detail than I would like, and therefore need their contrast reduced. Or perhaps it’s the other way around - areas of the frame that I thought were prominent in the image on screen, seem to lack it once printed. I have found that sometimes things that require presence in the edit - can be pushed much much further in the edit. And printing seems to tell me that I have only reached 50% of where it should be, and there is still a further 50% more to go in pushing the contrasts etc.

The main take away from this is":

“if an image looks good in print: it will look good on the monitor. But not the other way around”

If you don’t print, you only reach 90% of final intention of the image.

Photoshop Actions

I use actions all the time. They allow me to reduce ‘screwing up’ more than tends to happen when printing. There is already much to do to prepare an image for print and the Epson print driver is a nightmare (luckily, I do not use it - I have a much simpler piece of software that allows me to simply drag the file to the printer for printing).

But here are my actions for printing. I have these set up as constant actions for any images I work on.

You may notice that I have three actions at the top for saving PSD, Save for Web, Open Shadows etc. These are a feature of my editing workflow: I like to audition edited images as jpegs for my website. I also like to have a simple way of saving PSD files into one area.

As I edit, I audition the jpegs together in Lightroom’s gallery. I can see how the portfolio fits together.

As to preparing images for print, I LOVE the PixelGenius sharpener toolkit for Photoshop. It is now end of life, and not supported. But with a bit of work, it can still operate on the latest versions of photoshop. Despite what PixelGenius claim, I do not think the Lightroom sharpeners are an improvement. I tested them and I think they are not as good as the sharpener toolkit is.

So far I’ve managed to keep the PixelGenius sharpener toolkit running on the very latest version of Photoshop. If you are running on Monterey they should just work with PS 2023. If you are running on Ventura then the Automate/ Sharpener GUI is not visible. You have to run PS in Rosetta mode to get them to operate. You may also need to give Ventura permissions to run the plugins.

Use the MacOS UNIX terminal to do this. Copy/paste the following:

sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine

Be sure to add a space after the e of ‘quarantine’

Then drag & drop the ‘PG Toolbox Plug-in Module’ plug-in (located inside Plug-Ins inside the PS
install folder) onto the terminal window …
and press enter. It will ask you for your password.

Restart Photoshop. If the toolkit is not visible, quit and restart PS in Rosetta mode.

Capture Sharpener reintroduces the loss of detail that is inherent in all capture mediums. In digital cameras the anti-aliasing filter introduces softness to the file. Use Capture Sharpener to recover lost detail. In my case, it is my film scanner that introduces loss of detail. PixelGenius has a capture-sharpener algorithm for 6x6 positive film and it works great for me.

I then resize down to the intended final output size. My printer’s resolution is 1440 dots per inch. I use 360 pixels per inch (this is a clean division of 1440 dots per inch). The theory being that you are trying to map a clean division of pixels in the file to dots on the printer. Therefore using an image resolution of 360 pixels per inch allows for 4 pixels to be quantised down to 1 dot (1440 / 4 = 360).

Once resized, I then sharpen for inkjet output. This is where most folks go wrong with printing manually. They tend to apply sharpener onto the file so that it looks good on the monitor. They are in essence ‘sharpening for monitor’.

We need to over-compensate when sharpening for print. This is because the printer tends to soften down the image. This is why I love PixelGenius output sharpener. It takes all the guess work away for me, and tends to apply the correct degree of ‘over’ sharpening.

I then covert to the correct colourspace, and 8-bit mode.

I use Photoshop actions all the time, and I have been using this kind of format for so many years now. If I keep the same process, then editing, and re-printing become more perfunctory. Less to think about, less to go wrong. I can get on with the art of trying to make the prints as good as possible, while reducing my chances of getting some part of the print process wrong.