Printing Photographs

Dee_000

Dee_000

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Name
Donna
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Hi

I have just bought and installed my first printer (HP photosmart with wireless) and my test picture wasnt too good. I know that I will probably have to do things a bit different with my pictures to get the best out of a printed picture, eg colour management, use of "black" in LR3 (I read somewhere that you shouldnt increase the black on pictures as you wont see the detail when printing). I dont normally print my pictures, so any advice would be great?

D
 
scottthehat said:
probably be beter in the printing section, and might be worth giving poah a pm hes the man to speak to about printing he might even sort you out some profiles.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'm still finding my way around the forum :):)

D
 
Can you say what wasn't correct with the print you made?

A common issue is that the print comes out too dark.
This isn't exactly a fault with the printer, but is due to the fact that most monitors are set too bright.
If you still have the manual which came with your monitor, there might be a section in there about how to set the brightness and contrast. It will make things look quite bland and darker probably.
If you can get hold of one, calibrate the monitor with a hardware device. There was a thread on here with one doing the rounds of the country. (The talk equipment thread).

The other thing to consider is that rooms are often quite dark. I find that energy saving bulbs are awful for this, even with a well printed image, the lack of light makes them appear very dark. Try taking the image outside.

Consider, a print has to reflect the light back to you, a monitor shines the light out to you.
I often add (photoshop) a brightness/contrast layer with +10 on the brightness just before I print, even though I have a calibrated monitor and printer, mainly because of the awful lights I have.

With colour management, you need to set only one of the items through to the output device to be the master of the colour management. I.e. Lightroom (photoshop) manages the colour management, and the printer has colour management turned off. In this way, the printer will print out what it is told to print, not a conversion of what it was told to print.
 
Printing isn't that difficult but you can run into some problems which can be sorted.

First of all I would make prints straight from the image on the screen and the evaluate them. Don't try initially to add things like increasing the black . ( Don't know why you would want to do that ) ,

You say you were not happy with the initial prints, can you say why you were unhappy with them ? That may give some initial indication as to the problem.

If you are not using printer profiles within Lightroom make sure you have set the printing module up correctly. You need to select the "Printer manages color" option. Then make sure you have selected the correct paper terms in the printer dialogue. This is where things can go wrong. Can't help to much with an HP machine as I'm an Epson user and not familiar with the HP interface
 
Hi

thanks for your replies

I need to print a few more pictures I think before I worry too much.

The picture I printed is of my little black dog with another little dog out of focus in the background lying on a redish brick floor and a stone wall behind.

There isnt a lot of detail in Penny (my black dog) but actually looking at the picture on the screen now, there isnt a lot of detail in the picture anyway, so I will need to rectify that for future pictures. The rest of the picture has now got a bit of a yellow cast to it, the red floor is more orange, similarly with the wall. I have attched (hopefully-I didnt manage to well last time!) a copy of the picture, this is just a copy saved from FB.

penny_00.jpg


D
 
I suspect you will struggle with that picture, I suggest you use an alternate picture to start with.

I use an old HP Photosmart and (now) I only use HP inks and paper, I tried some really cheap paper from Aldis once which gave fantastic results, trouble was they faded after about 3 months:thinking:.

I also use Qimage to print with a rather confusing application, but give great results.
 
john-oh said:
I suspect you will struggle with that picture, I suggest you use an alternate picture to start with.

I use an old HP Photosmart and (now) I only use HP inks and paper, I tried some really cheap paper from Aldis once which gave fantastic results, trouble was they faded after about 3 months:thinking:.

I also use Qimage to print with a rather confusing application, but give great results.
Click to expand...

Thanks john-oh

I will have another go this evening with a couple of different pictures and see what they look like.

watch this space :lol::lol:

D
 
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