Printing digital photographs or making photo books becomes more and more popular, whether it’s a gift for good friends, a presentation of your work or prints for an exhibition.

Most of the labs and printing plants have automated processes for printing, but these processes need the right “input”, that means, your files should meet some requirements, such as resolution and colorspace. Modern machines can fix some issues with the resolution and colorspace but in the end there is no warranty that the output is that what you really wanted. So in the next steps, we’ll go thru the tasks you need to do, to deliver the right “input” and get the right “output” :-)

The screenshots below are made using Adobe Photoshop CS2 and are similar to most of the “modern” photo editing software, however the terms may be different but the workflow is the same.

1. Open your file
2. After that press “ctrl + alt + i” to get the image size dialog

untick

* scale styles
* constrain proportions
* resample image

then type the desired dpi (300) in the resolution field and hit OK

Now the file is been set to 300 dpi without resampling the pixels. Please make sure that the file is big enough for a real print (look at the size cm/in)

3. Assign colorspace

Some cameras assign their own colorspace to the files, so it’s always good to check if the file has teh right colorspace and apply the right one if there is a different colorspace embedded.

Menue: edit - convert to profile
The dialog box shows the destination space and the settings you should use (red stroked box)

Hit OK

(if your image has more layers, then it will be automatically flattened)

4. Save the image

Press “ctrl + shift + s”, the save as dialog box appears

Choose a name (different than your initial file, so you have always a backup), include the colorspace in the file and press “save”.

The next dialog box appears to set the tiff options. Set image compression to “LZW” and leave the other settings as shown in the box.

That’s all. :-)

As a sidenote, you may check the sharpness of the file. Because some of you use the camera “built in” sharpening process, or prefer to sharpen when developing the raw files and others may sharpen when the file is being post processed, I haven’t put the sharpening in the workflow shown above.

The “Sharpening 1×1″ will be part of my next post. Stay tuned.

Cheers, Vernon Trent

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