Topic awaiting preservation: Printing my Pics (Page 1 of 1)

I know someone whose got some pics they made framed on there walls, I think some people here have done it as well (but I don't remember who). I got some pics I'm working on, and some others done that I wanna hang up too! I've never made anything for print before so Can you guys gimme a primer. My be a good topic for the FAQ too. (Yeah, I DID search there first! ) I figure if I wanna frame it I gotta make the Resolution real high, but how do I know HOW high for certain DPIs. I'm thinking about just buying some of the fancy photo paper from best buy and just printing them out myself because its probably the only way I will be able afford it even though I'll be limited to 8.5x11 because my printer is a small little Deskjet 932C. Would you guys reccomend other options though? Kinkos or even Zazzle have crossed my mind.

Thanks

Note you said: "I've never made anything for print before" with that in mind, here I go!!!

Right:

What you see on screen is not really what you get on paper. You screen is RGB (red, blue and green and a printer is CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). But with that said you can almost match what you see one screen is what you might get on paper with Screen Calibration hardware and software (at a cost). But try print at home and if it's not what you want, then talk to a print service and ask for a quote on what you want printed.

But for either home or for a printing service you need to make sure:

1) It's 300dpi for high quality prints, other dpi for other usages but that's another topic. I always make my stuff in 300dpi, artwork, design, ect as it give you a very high stranded of image.

2) in CYMK mode (for final print not when working in it)

Don't know how many times I been fu*kup with printing files in RGB and getting the wrong colours of colours. If you start in Photoshop or another program to great images there more likely to be RGB, which is the best for working in as you have full filters, options to work with, but just as you go to print, make it a TIFF or something, open that and convert it to CMYK mode. But saying that I have a HP 920, which is crap and is a home printer, plus it does not matter what mode I have my images in, it still prints out the same. So if your printing is a crap, cheap printer, do proof of some images in both modes and compare them to you liking.

3) If you pick nice photo paper (matt or glossy), and you should do!! make sure you set up you file to print with that paper as sometimes you might not get what you want, because you have set it for normal paper. Have look in your print manual for this info (normally should be all print dialog box with tabs where you can set papers, quality settings, ect for that printer)

Remembers what else there is?. come on think colours? *

I think that?s it but I guess some one with more experience person will come along and piont out more things.

COPEY

if you make the original art in PS then you might check the ICC color profile(s) for your monitor and your printer.
This could be intresting to you HP-Info

"Freedom of speech is by no means freedom to insult others" from the Razorart goodbye letter.

Just to add a couple of thoughts.... If you are printing this at home, then you do not need a resolution as high as 300 dpi. Try 150-200 dpi (depending on printer quality), which will look the same as 300 dpi, BUT will be a much smaller file and take far less time to print. Also if you are printing to a non-postscript inkjet, you do not need to convert your RGB image to CMYK - even though the printer prints in CMYK, it cannot handle being sent that information. It wil convert your CMYK data to RGB then back to CMYK, which will probably give you a bigger surprise than if you had just left the image as RGB.

However, if you get the image professionally printed, then yes, you will need to provide a 300 dpi CMYK.

About professional printing.
Today i talked to my boss (i am working at a printservice) she said she realy liked to have printed thingies as a pdf file.
when i understand correctly thit was 'cose the pdf format is very familiar to the Postscript and PCL print languages.
Besides that it's a portable format so it should be the same in different setups, even if your printservice uses Mac's they will not have a problem with the pdf files.

The other thing if you plan on printing your art do not blow your files using PS resize/resample settings. If you want it to look good you don't want to see interpolated pixels PS generates when using the resize function. Though it might look good on screen it almost everytime turns out to be shit on print.

If part of your artwork comes from a scanner make shure you blur it a bit to get rid off the scanner raster and make shure moire effects are minimal. You realy don't want those on paper. I suggest you do a search for info on derasterizing and moire effects.

"Freedom of speech is by no means freedom to insult others" from the Razorart goodbye letter.

Thanks for all the great advice I'm getting. I do still have a few questions. I'm pretty sure my printer supports 720dpi printing, and I'd be willing to waste the ink if I'm the results will looks a lot better. (after all I bought the exspensive paper to go with it, and I'm gonna be framing these things, I'm want 'em to look NICE =) Also, some of the pics I plan on printing are done in POV-Ray, so I have the ability to render them at higher resolutions so I don't have to worry about scaling problems. How do I know WHAT resolution to render though? I'm assuming if I want 300dpi I just multiply that by 8.5x10inches for the paper but this is only a guess.

If you're printing to a laser printer/inkjet and not having it commercially printed, anything over 200dpi is a waste of memory. You won't see any difference in quality.
Promise
and yeah 200pixels x 8.5" =1700pixels wide

An image printed from a home inkjet at 200dpi vs 300 dpi won't look any different. Trust me, I've done massive experimentation.

I've printed lots of 8x10s of photos I've taken and people who look at them have no idea I printed them off. They just think they're enlargements of a negative. I use a Canon S800. It's a middle of the road inkjet but it does use a 6-tank system for ink and the results impress me. There's the CMYK of course and then it has a Photo Magenta and a Photo Cyan to reach those darker colors that the CMYK gamut fails to reach.

Other than that, that's about all I have to add to all the good advice above.

:::krets.net:::

Ok, thanks for the info about dpi. I'm glad i won't be wastin' all that ink now (i just found out that if i set my printer to best it defaults to 1200dpi !!!)

My understanding of this image resolution vs printer resolution is that it can take up to 4 squirts of ink (i.e. 4 'dots') to print one pixel, if the colour of that pixel is a mixture of all four inks. So even if your desktop printer is rated as 600 dpi, then the best resolution graphic it can print is in the region of 150-200 ppi, assuming not every pixel requires all four ink colours. Higher resolution graphics are truly just a waste of space and printing time UNLESS they are being output commercially on an imagesetter.



[This message has been edited by Eggles (edited 03-09-2003).]