Best image type for printing

To be honest highest quality jpg is usually fine. How big are you printing? What does your lab accept?
 
It's a little more complex than that once you start sending things to the printers :)

You need to know the size you are printing to and resize your image to fit and you also need to have the right colour profile for the printer you are using.

Most use sRGB and mine also has a european profile (can't remember the exact name from photoshop) embedded. I now have my CS3 set up to work only in that colour space.
 
Ideally a TIFF file is the best as this is a pixel for pixel representation. However provided it's not opened and re saved lots of times a low compression jpeg is usually fine. As a rough guide aim for one that's no smaller than 10% of the orriginal file size ( uncompressed)

So a 25Mb file in Photoshop or equivalent shouldn't be much smaller than about 2.5Mb as a jpeg. Jpeg files do vary in size from one image to the other, it depends on the image content, so if you set the compression level to 10 in Photoshop it will vary from image to image.

When in doubt talk to the lab that's doing the printing. They'll be able to give you the information you want.

One other point, be careful with sharpening. Be carefull about sharpening. Over sharpening can lead to some very disappointing results. Don't forget most printing software applies applies a level of sharpening anyway. Just be gentle with the sharpening slider:)
 
Chappers said:
One other point, be careful with sharpening. Be carefull about sharpening. Over sharpening can lead to some very disappointing results. Don't forget most printing software applies applies a level of sharpening anyway. Just be gentle with the sharpening slider:)
Click to expand...

Interestingly depending on who you read they suggest modest oversharpening for printing due to colour bleed from ink droplets.

"One of the biggest leaps of faith in the entire Photoshop universe is sending pixels that looks hideous on screen to a printing device, but if the pixels don't look seriously crunchy on the display, you're almost certainly under-sharpening your images. The only reliable way to evaluate print sharpening is to sharpen the image, print it, and look at the print!" extract from Real World Image Sharpening for Photoshop CS2 :thumbs: great book to read for sharpening technique.
 
Chappers said:
Ideally a TIFF file is the best as this is a pixel for pixel representation.
Click to expand...

What you mean is that the tiff compression is lossless. As is a PSD Photoshop file. Not sure what a pixel x pixel representation is?

Chappers said:
When in doubt talk to the lab that's doing the printing. They'll be able to give you the information you want.
Click to expand...

THis is the best info provided but even at that, you need to get a decemnt lab :)

Regards sharpening, look at ytour image at 100% and apply what looks right. I've never had any problems.

THe OP is looking at a roughly 30"x20" print. When printing such a large image you don't need a massive file. I look to print images this size at 150ppi-200ppi - that is between 4000 and 5500 pixels on the longest edge.

You should be ok with a 10Mp+ camera to resize a little and get this. That saif I printed a 30x20 on my 20D and it looks amazing :)
 
I produce large format prints onto canvas and I've generally found that the best quality pictures I receive for printing are those in TIFF format.

I find that when you print from JPG files using the sRGB colourspace, the colours can be quite vivid and for most subjects this is perfectly acceptable.

However if you have a subject with fine graduated colour tones (e.g. skies) then you will have a better result saving your file in TIFF format. I've also found you will get more natural tones from your image is you use AdobeRGB colourspace setting on your camera and finer gradations using 16-bit images.

I agree with everything that has already been said about sharpening - don't overdo it! It's very easy to turn natural skin into plastic when using the sharpening tool.

If you're upscaling with photoshop and you're happy with the original sharpening applied, then you'll be fine using 'bicubic'
 
Most printers print in 8bit so saving 16bit files for printing is generally a waste of time. Sure edit in 16bit before exporting for print. Adobe RGB certainly has a wider colourspace but I would reserve the use for that only if you have a colour managed workflow.

Whilst I agree with your comments sometimes it's overkill. I've tried tif, psd and jpg and to be honest, I don't see the difference for most images (inc skies - unless I've heavily resampled).
 
Yip that's the key. Your lab will dictate to you what it requires. Take their advice.
 
Another point to consider is how your sending the pics to lab, if it's on disk your fine using either jpeg or tiff, but if your emailing tiff can be huge file sizes, theres a fair chance it'll be too big to email.
 
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