Preparing Digital Photos for Printing
How to Achieve Better Print Results
Summary
In this FotoTV film, Christian Fickinger shows viewers how to prepare digital files before sending them to online printing service to turn pixels into prints.
Fickinger is the owner of www.digiprinz.de, an online print service specializing in fine art prints for large formats. Today he comprehensively covers the four most important aspects of digital printing, resolution, file format, color management, and sharpening. As Fickinger demonstrates with numerous examples, key to the resolution is PPI, or pixels per inch. This is important in digital photography printing because it determines print quality. The more pixels you can cram into every inch, the better the print will be.
Another highlight of the film is file format. Nowadays photographers have many options when sending their digital files to an online printing service. JPEG, Tiff, and PDF are several of the most popular file formats known. Fickinger lists all other file formats available to achieve the best and most professional result. For instance the JPEG file format, which compresses image data, is suitable for sending pictures in e-mail or posting them to the web. For fine art photo printing TIFF files are more appropriate because the images are smoother and crisper.
Fickinger also points out that a computer monitor and print paper are completely different media. Therefore, the print isn’t going to be an exact match of what is displayed on the monitor and he gives some great tips on color management to great quality photo prints.
Comments
Very practical!
I like the practical approach that is taken in this film. It's refreshing to see that there is a real expert who dares to clean up with quality myths. I know from experience that this is a risky stand. Whenever I propose a simple srgb workflow resulting in 150dpi jpgs for large diasecs, then photographers usually look at me like... "poor guy, he knows nothing about quality" ;-)
On the other hand when people just look at my diasecs and don't know how they were made them they go like "that was medium format, RAW, right? You used this new 8 ink system for print, correct? Unbelievable resulution - is that 1200 dpi?". Funny!
So everybody, thanks a lot for this good film.
I wish you good light!
-- Michael
...interesting...
This is a good example for me, to contact your print-provider(or look at Foto-TV :) ) before you send images for printing. My experience is, files will b e handelt in different ways, so the results from printing the same file from differnt providers are different.
Tests always are useful.
preparing for printing
Nice must watch video for anybody who tends to print pictures bigger than 10 x 15 cm. Two things to colormanagement I would add.
1. The colormanagement is all about fidelity - to get the print as you have shot it. It is the way how all devices in the workflow ( typically camera - monitor - printer )
tells each other "this color in my language is this color in yours". Knowing at least basics of colormanagement is fundamental to get prints as you expect them.
2. Option to expensive HW calibrated monitors are external calibration devices. For about 450 USD you can have more than acceptable solution. Buying the chepest stuff is of course loss of money.
wish you good light