Printing a Digital Camera Picture Photography

One of the greatest advantages of digital photography is that it lets us obtain images without the need of a darkroom. Not only do we not have to develop our rolls, but we can obtain black and white or color of the characteristics we want and almost instantly. Nonetheless, the stability of the tones of a printer copy through time, above all if the image is exposed to light, is much less than a print on photographic paper. The digital prints are more fragile and deteriorate easier while with photographic paper it is laminated and resists scratches and spots much better. If we add the cost of high quality printing paper we will see that, besides being made at home, printer copies are more expensive than those sent to the lab. Obtaining a good print also requires controlling the color reproduction as we have seen in earlier sections, and calibration instruments are needed for the image tones to be correct, faithful to the original scene. A print with poor contrast or a color dominant is the last thing we want to print. Photoshop supposes by defect that the image we are going to print will be in a DinA4 format placed in vertical format (portrait configuration). When our image is horizontal, to print it we will have to first select the landscape configuration in

File > Adjust page.

 The printer

The precision we need to print text or graphics on a printer is very far from that needed to print maximum quality photographs. Therefore it is necessary to first find out if the printer is calibrated. To calibrate the printer we need to print a test file, scan it and analyze the obtained tones. Naturally, this only makes sense if our scanner is already calibrated. The sample file can be creator in Photoshop. First we open a new document ( File > New ) of, for example, 6 cm high by 18 wide, of a resolution of 300 ppi and in RGB mode. In the color selector we will select the defect colors (black and white) and will make a linear degrading from white to black with the corresponding tool. Next we will convert this degradation to a grayscale with the menu image > Adjust > Poster, and selecting 18 in the number of levels. By definition these 18 tones of gray are neutral: they contain the same proportions of red, green and blue. Now we will print the image in our printer on the same high quality paper with which we will make our photographic prints. Next we scan the printed strip; if we haven't achieved a perfect calibration of the scanners output we will apply the generic adjustment of levels for the scanner as seen in 10.8.4.5; and finally, analyze the color of the scanned file with the pointer and info box. If the values of the RGB channels aren't equal it is necessary to calibrate the printer (ignoring the factory settings) and make different tests until finding and saving a personalized output for our printer. This guarantees a faithful correspondence between what we see (a calibrated monitor), the objective data of the info box and the tones of the printed image.