How to Prepare your Photos for Print 

I love turning an image into a print, it’s the final step and you learn so much from it as it’s on display 24/7 and not stuck in a folder

I've spent half the day looking for tips on how to set files ready for print and couldn't find the information I needed. I stumbled across your video and have learnt so much! Wish I'd found it early. Love your photos and love your videos! Thank you so much for sharing.

Thanks so much for this useful information William. I know that this video is from one year ago, but I am just now learning how to improve my printing workflow. This will come in very handy for me going forward. Thanks again.

Thank you so much for this great video. You've completely demystified the daunting process of preparing and sizing images for print. Your steps are really clear. I especially like that you give us the thought process behind your decisions. That's great teaching. Having avoided it for ages, I'm now ready to give it a go!

It’s crazy how different prints look! Thanks for this! I was actually reading a photo mag the other day and specifically the blues looked insane! Maybe they should watch this 😁😁

I'm getting to the point where I want to start printing my images and this was really informative. Cheers mate!

Nice video William, thanks.

Very helpful. THANKS!

Thank you!!!! Easy to understand, super!

Thank you so much dude! Answered all my questions.

Thanks William for this video. I watched it right away on your advice regarding the brightness settings for images.

Agree with your strategy 100 percent

Thanks so much, this is 🔥

Thx for your help!

Very helpful video - about to take the plunge into printing some of my images - many thanks!

@WilliamPatinoPhotography Thank you for this video. Awesome! It's everything I've been looking for.

Excellent Vid and advice. just as i like it. clear, concise and no annoying unnecessary info. Brill. Thanks very much.

Thanks for a great video

Thank you!

Great tips!

Awesome Will, thanks for sharing this. I have just sent some test prints to the lab and am trying different fine art papers but I wasn't aware of having to pull up the blacks so much. I got stuck on the resizing also, oh well, all test and error. Thanks again!

Nice one mate. This has clued me up to the extent I can start having a few photos printed professionally on canvas. Thanks mate.

just came across this today.. very informative in easy to understand lingo.. i was aware of a lot of terms before, for eg tiff, psd, files but never knew which file to use, uou have explained it perfectly. thank you

This a very relatable vid to what I struggle with. Getting it right from computer screen to print is frustrating, most of the time it’s darker then you won’t, cheers for the pointers man

Thankyou so much Sent off my first print thankyou ☺️

Nice one Will. You have confirmed what I have found doing my own printing - re the pulling up the blacks. I use Marrutt paper (Superb) and use a profile from them but the darks were still coming out too dark, so I have started doing what you suggest. Thank you for confirming that as I thought I must be doing something wrong.

By coincidence I was at a print shop last week and a student had some large black and white printing done and to her dismay they were way darker than they appeared when she edited them. My take was maybe the monitor was not calibrated correctly, but thanks to your video, I now know it could be otherwise. Your tip about a trial print is a good one too.

also try threshold adjustment layer, slide slider all the way to one side then gradually move it the next direction till the black start to show, then take the "color sampler tool and click on a black spot, then slide the slider all the way to next side then gradually move it till the whites start to show up and use the color sampler tool again and click and put a point on the white , delete threshold adjustment layer , then open curves and it the properties panel, there are 3 eye droppers, click on the one that says sample black point , now click on the picture where you set the black point from the sample tool, then go to the sample white point eye dropper and click on the picture where you set the white point , after open levels and on the properties window where you can adjust the shadows midtones and highlights sliders, in the shadow box where it has zero, input the number 7 and on the highlights side input 247, from there you can adjust the midtones accordingly slightly ........ then print.

Great video, thank you! I want to start printing my images but keep asking myself: what is actually real in terms of exposure and contrast? The info on boosting shadows, contrast and exposure to compensate for you monitor being backlit was a real lightbulb moment, ha ha! That also explains why my images look darker when I post to FB or IG. I am also going to try editing with my monitor at around 50% brightness, as you suggested. Thanks again!

Very informative Will .thank you. I had some canvas printed and got a protective coating applied (as recommended) but found it was too shiny and made it look bad if you didn't look at it front on .I also heard that you can apply a protective coating to paper prints so you would not have to put it behind glass ( I do have spraypainting gear) do you know what product to use for that? another question is how do you mount onto foamboard (if it is not self adhesive?) your tutorials are refreshingly clear and informative

Thanks brah. Printed a few images from officemax for the first time and it came out really dark than the images lol. I got suprisingly good results from a 11x17 print for $1 compared to a $3 11x17 print with a heavier stock paper from Fedex. The cheaper one had less gloss so you could see it better but it bends and wrinkles alot easily compared to the heavy stock one.

Many thanks. Really enjoyed this video. Do you ever use soft proofing and ICC profiles? Your video made the whole printing procedure much easier. Thanks again!

Hi great video. I was wondering what brightness you set you monitor too and does this affect the results of brightness in the editing process?

Thanks. Very educational. Do you untick the resample box in Photoshop when you make very large prints? I read somewhere that you only use resample when you make your images smaller.

Wish I had seen this before I did my first metal print, lol. Just as you say it came out way dark...maybe 2 stops or so. Some others came out okay but this one was a waterfall on an overcast foggy day in GSMNP. I'll have to try canvas. Good points.

Hi Will, do you keep the 'embed color profile' option checked when saving? Thank you!

What color space are you using or should you use? Srgb or adobe rgb?

Hi Will another informative video. I have a question regarding sharpening for print. Where within your workflow do you do any sharpening for print?

Great advice. I’d also be interested in what you can do to help the framing process: Border versus no border, cropping to standard sizes versus custom ratios.

Can I do that with a iPad Pro using photoshop as well?

Will how does Milky Way shots look on canvas? Thanks

From my research so far I'm seeing the majority of people saying a raw RGB color photo from DSLR camera needs converted to a CMYK color profile instead when printing to counteract the issues of photo darkening on prints. What are your thoughts on this? Toe-May-Toe , Tuh-Mah-Toe? Thank you for your different perspectives and output to the community, I'm learning and that's always good. Appreciate it

Which print lab do you use?

nice

Thanks for a great video, it's just what I needed to know. I have not tried preparing an image for print before so if I could ask one stupid question; from your workflow you don't sharpen the image at all. Is this not requireed when you prepare an image for print. Thanks

Unless I missed something, you didn't mention sharpening. How do you sharpen your raw file and the print ready file?

W.P. up on your shelf to your left there's a GM lens missing it's rear cap, dust trap?

Based on your experience, could you please recommend the lab in NZ that you get your prints?. This will give us the confidence and trust to go with recommended lab. Thx once again for putting out such informative video.

Have you ever used Bay Photo? Any lab you recommend? Thank you for this!!

William, Thanks for tips! when you are making the adjustments to you file to account for the exposure/shadows/darkness, I noticed you did not change anything with the sharpness. Do you add any sharpening to you image for print?

👍👍

Thanks for this video. How come my image size/dimensions are smaller when I export out of lightroom? I cannot figure out how to get the edited image to photoshop to be the same size as the original..I am worried I won't be able to print 16x20 photos as it's going from 4200x2900 down to 3500x2200. Any idea? Thanks!

I usually use Lightroom for editing and exporting. For print I usually use jpg large format or Tiff for exporting from Lightroom. Will it be alright. I use Canon Eos R full frame 30 mp camera.

If printing a book, don't you want to export as a CMYC file from an RGB file before sending to printer? Thanks.

What setting are you using on your monitor, ARGB? And what does your print shop map too?

I find most labs here have very small image file sizes for their printing services, rendering them useless. A 16 bit tiff @ A2 resize/150DPI is typically ~400mb and well above the file size limit on offer. Even as a JPG it's a fail...very frustrating. I note that you didn't change the ICC colour profile. I presume that the lab you use does that for you?

Hello, I'm looking to sell my photos on Etsy. I'm not going to be printing out the prints, Etsy works with a 3rd party that does the printing. So I'm wondering, how should I save my pictures for the website? Because I know people will want all different sizes. Thank you.

A bit surprise you didnt mention ICC profile. Don’t you use any?

I have had the problem in the past when getting say and 8x10 printed. It comes back to me 8x10 but with parts of the image cropped off. I want to assure that if I want and image a certain size it will come back to me that size without cropping.

Very informative. Firstly, I use Lightroom Classic and my problem is how to resize an image to fit a specific frame. The image dimension is 6000 x 4000 pixels and I want to fit this image into an Ikea frame with mount 50 cm ( 19.685 inches) width x 70 cm ( 27.559 inches) height. also allowing a bit to overlap the mount. Your comments would be appreciated.

When raising the levels aren’t you concerned about clipping the whites?

The problem for me with canvas is it makes the work look cheap and nasty. Nice matt and frame will always make the image as a package look better in my opinion.

Thank you for the information. But the music in the background is really taking over. Muzak is so tiring

what guts me is the cost of framing just recently went and got one framed and it was 800.00 since the last one i got framed was 500.00 the cost of similar has gone through the roof......and before you say you can do cheaper...spent money on professionally getting printed and heaps of time taking and editing said photos ...why would you use cheap frames that dont look good.....I would luv to get more printed as thats relativily cheap...but framing is expensive

I’ve never once printed anything.