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Making prints of my paintings.
I would love to make good quality prints of some of my paintings. I exhibit in two exhibitions each year, one where we can not sell prints and another where anything goes. I have tried getting prints made of some Watercolour Paintings but the greens in particular turned out horrendous. I got a few photos printed in a photographic printers, I had loaded them up to a memory stick, the delicacy of floral photos did not come out well. I took the same media stick to a Stationery shop and they printed it out on regular paper and the results were perfect.The Stationery shop told me that they cannot scan anything bigger than A3 or quarter imperial. So after all that my question is ...if I do as @David_Quinn_carder advised in the thread on processing the Photographs of paintings for the Web, and save the results onto a media stick would this be a good way to make Prints? Currently because of the economic climate prints sell well at Art and Craft Exhibitions. :-?
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Check out this info http://www.gicleeprinterreview.org/wf/gicleeprinting.html
Denis
Does your DSLR have a full frame sensor? You could take several shots with different exposure settings and then combine them in Photoshop. It won't be the same as scanning your work at the print shop or having your work photographed as mentioned above but it will be better than what you have right now.
Images for the web are not measured in PPI. The whole 72ppi (often stated 72dpi) for the web thing is complete and total hogwash. Try it yourself — go take any image into Photoshop and change the PPI in the image size to any number you want… say, 2ppi. Save it, then make another copy at 3000ppi. Make sure to uncheck the "Resample" box so the pixel dimensions don't change. The resulting image will be identical. PPI is only applicable for physical media. Digital images — and thus, images for the web — are solely measured in pixel dimensions. A 200px × 200px image will take up 200px × 200px on the web, and be the same file size, regardless of the PPI set. Setting PPI only changes the scale of the image when printed. A 200px × 200px image printed at 200dpi will be 1in x 1in printed, while a 200px × 200px image printed at 50dpi will be 4in × 4in. Regardless, on screen the 200px × 200px image will be 200px × 200px, which will vary in on-screen size depending on the pixel density of the display.
Amazingly, this myth is still widely prevalent, which is why contests often ask for files at such-and-such DPI. DPI and PPI are only meaningful if they're coupled with a physical printed size. In other words, saying "we require a 1200dpi file" is pointless, but saying "we require a 1200dpi file with a minimum size of 8in × 10in", or "we require a true-to-scale 1200dpi file" makes perfect sense.
And actually, it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense because a good $1,000 camera these days can only take an image that is less than 4in × 3in at 1200dpi.
Anyway… @marieb As far as printing your own stuff… files that are Saved for Web should never be used for anything except for emailing to someone or posting directly to the web. In fact, if you're uploading to Facebook or something, they're going to process it on their end (compress it more), so you shouldn't even send them Saved for Web files. My guide didn't cover printing, but basically here's what you do:
1) Buy a good printer. If you don't need to laminate prints, the Epson Artisan 1430 might be sufficient, but I can't say for sure. If you do need to laminate prints, or you're serious about this, the only options I can safely recommend are the Epson Stylus Photo series (with the R3000 being the best deal of the bunch by far) or the printer we have, the Epson Stylus Pro 3880. For most purposes the Stylus Photo R3000 and the Stylus Pro 3880 are the same printer in different sizes. If you print often you'll make your money back on the cheaper ink refills compared to cheaper printers (which are more expensive to reload).
2) Don't skip Step 1. I think there used to be some cheaper adequate printers but times have changed, and the reality is, a good printer currently costs more money than we'd like.
3) Use Epson Premium Photo Paper (Ultra Premium is fine too but visually won't make a difference) — we use Epson Premium Glossy Photo Paper, which I recommend, but you can use Luster or Matte or something too. The important thing, though, is you need to set the correct printer profile for that paper. This does make a difference.
4) Let Photoshop handle the color management. There's an option for this (see attached images for all the settings I used on a recent print). This makes a huge difference. It wouldn't hurt to have set the image to AdobeRGB during the RAW processing, and this may make a significant difference, but I haven't tested this yet (or rather, I haven't tried NOT starting with an AdobeRGB file for printing, because it's worked so well).
5) Make sure you don't ever resample your image when resizing. The image should be the same pixel dimensions as it was when it came off the camera, minus any area of the image you cropped out. Only resize in inches (or some other physical unit of measurement), not pixels, and make damn sure the "resample" box is unchecked. For example, if you have a photo of your painting and you want to print it on a single 17×22in sheet of paper, you would go to image size and set the width to 16.5in, or the height to 21.5 inch… whatever you have to do to make it fit, with half an inch to spare, onto a 17×22in sheet. The PPI will change automatically, but as long as you aren't resampling when changing the size you know you're getting the maximum print resolution possible given your camera. If you need to print something to a true-to-life scale, that's easy too — if your painting in real life is 12in wide, set the width to in Photoshop to 12in.
6) When you finally print, make sure the scale is set to 100% and "scale to fit media" is unchecked.
7) Before judging your print, go into your studio with your balanced white light, or even outside in the sunlight. Our prints look terrible in our office light and some colors are muted, but it has something to do with the spectrum of the light in here I guess.
That's really all I can say about that for now. Let me know if you have questions.
As you can see on this stockphoto site http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-9956580-watermelon.php?st=29fbcf2 the images are sold based on resolution. 72dpi is considered screen only whereas 300dpi is print quality.
Also, RGB refers to colors on a screen, CYMK ink is for print. That's why you need to convert your image to tiff as it is separated into layers of ink colors. Pdf's can also be printed in color layers.
When I've experimented with cross-polarization I will add it to the guide.