25 TOP SUGGESTIONS FOR IDEAL PICTURE PRINTS
1. Choose carefully
If you’re prepared to limit your print size to A4, it makes sense to purchase a multi-purpose printer that’s good for creating both photos and documents. They’re quick and produce excellent-quality colour pictures.
2. Go large
For larger-format printing, A3+ or ‘Super A3’ has an optimum print size of 19x13in (483x329mm). That’s visibly larger than basic A3, and the aspect ratio is a better fit for the 3:2 format of many cameras. There’s a range of Canon and Epson designs to choose from (see above and the following pages), or you could take a bigger step up to an A2 printer, such as the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 and Epson SureColor SC-P800. These can produce picture prints that are twice the size of A3, at 23.4 × 16.5 in (594x420mm), but they do not come low-cost.
3. Direct printing
Many multi-function or ‘all-in-one’ printers consist of a PictBridge wi-fi, memory and port card slot, so they can print photos directly from suitable video cameras or memory cards without the requirement to use a computer. It can be useful if you need fast prints on the fly.
4. Screen your display
WYSIWYG sounds fantastic but, all too often, what you see on screen won’t match what you get on paper. The typical culprit is that the screen is set with expensive a brightness level and needs rejecting a bit. For supreme precision, purchase a monitor-calibration tool like the Datacolor Spyder5 Express.
5. Crop creatively
Unless you’re shooting with a 3:2 aspect ratio camera and printing on 6x4in postcard-sized image paper, you’ll often discover that your image files have a different element ratio to the paper you’re printing on. Instead of simply losing an automatic quantity off the bottom and leading or sides of the print, crop your image artistically so that it looks its finest when printed on paper.
6. Faster or much better?
The ‘normal’ quality setting in your printer’s settings need to prove adequate when producing postcard-sized prints. It ought to likewise make it possible for a good turn of speed, with each print just taking a matter of seconds to finish. For A4 or larger prints, it can be worth picking the best-quality setting, as prints can look partially sharper, and have a little better tonal definition and smoother graduations, although they’ll take longer to output.
7. Ready
Guarantee you pick the correct kind of paper in the printer properties or preferences dialog box. Colour accuracy and overall print quality is seriously based on this. If the settings are incorrect, you can end up with awful-looking results.
8. Auto repair
Particularly when printing images straight from your cam or sd card, the ‘car repair’ or ‘photo improve’ option readily available in most printers can assist to optimise print quality without the requirement for using manual editing or corrections.
9. Do not dry out
If you have a specialist picture printer that you only utilize periodically, it’s a good idea to switch it on at least when a week. A mini cleansing cycle will most likely be activated, but you may likewise produce a print on a plain sheet of paper; it uses a little of each colour ink. This assists to avoid ink drying in the nozzles of the print head over a period of time, which can be really difficult to clear, even with successive running of the print-head cleansing routine or a ‘deep tidy’ cycle.
10. Colour management
A lot of times, you ought to find that you get excellent results with your printer’s colour management set to ‘vehicle’. However, this can apply improvements which might make your photo prints look over-saturated in colour, or expensive in contrast. Especially if you’ve edited your images, use the handbook, standard colour setting or assign colour management to your editing program instead of let the printer have control.
11. Paper chase
Glossy image prints aren’t the only way to show your images. Semi-gloss or lustre documents are a good alternative, matt papers work actually well for pigment-based printers, and there’s a large range of ‘fine art’ papers on the marketplace, including the likes of canvas impact and picture rag. You’ll find that you can develop really distinctive-looking prints if you experiment with various media.
12. Get lined up
When you purchase and set up a new printer, it’s an excellent idea to run a print-head alignment regimen. This will make sure that you get the sharpest possible prints, with minimum deterioration from ink beads being misaligned. It’s worth duplicating the procedure every six months or so, and after carrying the printer to a different place.
13. Nozzle check
Specifically prior to creating a large-format inkjet print of A3+ or A2 size, it deserves running a nozzle check regimen. This will develop a test print that you can check for quality. It’s most likely that some of the nozzles in the print head are blocked if you discover any faint lines across the print. Run a head-cleaning cycle and repeat the test, to avoid squandering the cost of a large sheet of picture paper and accompanying ink.
14. Dye or pigment?
Professional picture printers of A3+ or larger formats tend to run on either pigment-based or dye-based inks. Pigment-based inks tend to be more robust for printing on matt paper, however typically lack the super-smooth finish and consistent reflectivity of dye-based inks on shiny paper.
15. It remains in the edit
If you’re producing prints to last a life time, it’s worth putting some effort into making them look their finest. A little care at the modifying phase can go a long way. At the minimum, you ought to use any essential corrections for colour, contrast and brightness performance.
16. Transportation system
The paper transportation system can become filthy after an extended period of time, which can break down print quality. Some printers have a regular that you can run for cleaning up the paper course, readily available from the maintenance section of the printer properties dialog box.
17. Best resolutions
A printing resolution of 300dpi (dots per inch) is something of an industry standard, but a lower resolution of 150dpi can however yield excellent outcomes, particularly when using an inkjet printer. As a rough guide, a 3MP (megapixel) image is sufficient for producing an A4 print, and a 6MP image is enough for an A3 print. Many present digital cameras have far greater megapixel counts anyhow, so you shouldn’t have any problems even when purchasing poster-sized prints from a lab.
18. Decompress
It can be appealing to apply aggressive compression settings when conserving JPEG files, so that they take up less room on your hard disk drive or other electronic storage, along with being quicker to submit to the web or send to people via e-mail. However, this can lead to undesirable compression artefacts and a destruction of quality that’s more obvious in printed pictures than on screen.
19. Across the border
When developing borderless prints, you’ll lose a percentage around the edges of your image owing to the print overlapping the location of the paper. You can typically choose the quantity of extension and lower it to minimise the loss, however take care not to end up with a thin white line along any of the edges. Likewise keep in mind that borderless printing is not ideal for plain paper or matt photographic paper.
20. Mono magic
Normal A4 photo printers operate on 6 inks at the most, and don’t have additional grey inks. A result of this is that mono photo prints can do not have clarity and contrast, as well as experience undesirable colour casts. For optimum mono quality, it’s worth updating to an A3+ photo printer that’s developed to excel at white and black as well as colour printing.
21. Test prints
Flaws that you can’t see on screen can be visible in small-format prints. Before producing a large-format print, attempt a little 6x4in picture and inspect it for defects. It likewise gives you an excellent idea of how the contrast, colour and brightness will search in your final large-format print.
22. Keep it real
Everyone likes a bargain and you can conserve a stack of money by purchasing cheap, non-genuine ink cartridges and photo paper. However, you run the risk of impurities obstructing the nozzles in your print heads and you’ll frequently discover that colour precision and general print quality are vastly inferior. In some tests, we discovered that inkjet picture prints created with inexpensive consumables began to visibly fade after only a few weeks, when they need to last for years.
23. Conserve cash
A much better method to conserve money on your printing expenses is to buy high- capacity cartridges. Some printers have the accessibility of XL and even XXL cartridges, as an alternative to standard-capacity alternatives. These will generally provide considerable savings, specifically for printing images which tend to use much more ink than general colour documents.
24. Conserve ink
A few of Epson’s range-topping, pigment-based printers utilize the very same channel in the print head for picture black and matt black. Each time you switch in between these 2 alternative cartridges, you’ll lose a large quantity of ink, as the channel requires to be purged and recharged before printing. Try for that reason to minimize the number of times you switch between glossy and matt media as much as possible with these printers.
25. Supersize your prints
When hung on the wall, even A3+ image prints can look a bit lost. Instead of developing your own large-format prints, it can be much better to utilize a premium online laboratory, such as Loxley Colour or Whitewall. You’ll need to await your prints to turn up in the post, but you can create much bigger prints and get extra choices, like boxed canvas and acrylic prints.
For A4 or bigger prints, it can be worth choosing the best-quality setting, as prints can look marginally sharper, and have slightly better tonal definition and smoother graduations, although they’ll take longer to output.
As a rough guide, a 3MP (megapixel) image is enough for producing an A4 print, and a 6MP image is enough for an A3 print. When creating borderless prints, you’ll lose a small quantity around the edges of your image owing to the print overlapping the location of the paper. You run the threat of pollutants clogging the nozzles in your print heads and you’ll often find that colour precision and total print quality are greatly inferior. You’ll have to wait for your prints to turn up in the post, but you can develop much larger prints and get extra choices, like boxed canvas and acrylic prints.
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