Printing to Improve Your Photography

Out on the 'net, you'll find a ton of sites with tips and tricks on how to improve your photography. While all (most) of these suggestions are worthwhile, all the reading in the world isn't as useful as doing and critically evaluating your results! Sure, this seems intuitive, but the big problem with this approach is that most folks do their evaluation on the monitor instead of a nice sized print!

Through a continuous feedback cycle of shoot-edit-print-edit-print, you'll quickly notice improvements in your output. As a bonus, you'll be beefing up your Photoshop skills along with your level of awareness in the field when you're out shooting.

Fishing at Dawn

Take the above image as an example. My first pass through this image cloned out a pole in the background & removed a couple of sensor dust spots. BUT, my first print of the image (an 10.5x7" print on a Canon i9900) ended up going straight to the shredder!

... Well, almost straight to the shredder. Before it met its end I marked up the print - circling the areas that need a little more attention before the image was ready to print "for real". I hadn't noticed these defects before I went to print: hidden (and very subtle) dust spots, the print was a little too dark overall, and my cloning was not blended well enough.

Paper v. Monitor
Even though my monitor is properly calibrated (via the ColorVision Spyder), sometimes it's hard to judge the correct amount of brightness, especially if you're using an LCD. You'll certainly notice a difference in the brightness on the monitor v. the printed page - unavoidable since one is projecting light while the other is reflecting it. This is something that you'll just need to get a feel for... but since you'll be making more prints as a result of reading this you should have no problem!

Using proper profiles for your paper and printer, especially as described by Bill Atkinson in LLVJ #15, will go a long way to reduce the differences. However, even with the moons aligned in the Photoshop Soft Proof view you're still going to need to fall back on experience in order to consistently make great prints.

Noise Issues in Print
I've noticed that noise tends to look considerably worse on screen than it does in print. Keep this in mind before you take out the Noise Ninja battle ax! With high ISO shooting, you'll often need to run some noise reduction, but it always comes at the cost of lost detail. Be conservative in how heavily you apply that filter: you may find that what looks "a little noisy" on screen looks just fine in print - don't be tempted to overdo it!

Chromatic Aberrations (CA)
There isn't a lot that you can do to avoid CA short of buying better glass or avoiding high contrast areas. However, the Lens Correction filters in Photoshop (and several RAW converters) can do a very good job at removing this artifact from your images. While you can see CA clearly when zoomed in, it's difficult to spot on the monitor with a scaled down view (partly due to the difference in DPI described below). You'll always notice it on paper, and once you start paying attention to the CA you'll get a good idea of where to look for it in your photographs before the first draft print.

Note that this is a little dangerous: once you start to notice CA in your photographs you'll be unable to ignore it! This almost always leads to an investment in lens upgrades... you have been warned!

Dust spots / Bad (unsmooth) edits
As I mentioned above, on-screen you may not notice some sensor dust or just how not-so-smooth your cloning was when you removed those stray bits. That's because you really need to zoom in to 100% (or more) to properly evaluate the image for dust or rough transitions. This is tough on most screens, since viewing actual pixels may mean that you've only got a small portion on the screen at a time.

In print, this all changes! You've got the full image laid out in front of you and (with most images & cameras) you'll notice things that you'd never have on the screen. Remember that when you're printing you've got 300 DPI or so, depending on your printer, but on the monitor you've only got around 72 DPI (depending on monitor). At that resolution, you'd need a monitor almost 42 inches across in order to display a 3,000 pixel-wide image on that screen at full resolution!

Where does the data go on screen? - It gets approximated away by the scaling algorithms, meaning that a blemish could be concealed like a zit in a Noxema ad.

The other thing you'll notice in print is that the transitions you've made during cloning or other image editing - especially when assembling panoramic images - just "jump out" at you more than they do on screen. You'll really know whether or not you've done an adequate job of feathering the changes... remember, when you look at the print you should have a hard time remembering exactly what changed & where!

Feedback Loop
As you practice this shoot, edit, print, edit, print cycle, you'll gain a more critical eye that'll help you to finish more of your editing in-camera and on-screen before the first attempt at a print. As you progress you'll find less and less to pick at in your prints, and maybe you'll even be totally satisfied in the first round. No matter what, all it has cost you is a little ink & a sheet of paper - and you're gaining priceless experience in the process.

Printing for fun
The final point I'd like to add is that printing is just plain fun! I greatly prefer viewing a properly printed image versus anything on screen. Seeing all of the minute detail, especially in large prints, is an experience that simply can't be reproduced on todays monitors. While that may change in the future, for now I'll be happily burning through ink cartridges trying to perfect my prints.

Now, unclog those nozzles and print something today!