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Printing in Black & White

Lesson 14 from: Capture and Edit Classic Black & White Portraits

Jared Platt

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Lesson Info

14. Printing in Black & White

Lesson Info

Printing in Black & White

What we're gonna do is we're gonna print this out, so I'm gonna actually start the print now because it takes a while to print. And so I'm gonna start the print. Then I'm gonna show you what I did. All right? So I like the print. I'm going to do one thing first, which is I'm gonna crop it to, um or, uh, like, eight by 10 ish kind of. Look, actually, I'm gonna I think I'm not gonna do it eight by but I'm gonna I'm just gonna crop it a little bit because I wanted to There that works. Okay, so I like that crop to it. And so now that I've got it cropped, I'm in. Actually, go up into the print module and I'm going to click on my canon print, so I'm gonna go to this is a cancer on paper, and it's a very specific kind of museum rag paper, which is really, really beautiful. Um, love, love, texture, ragged type paper. So I'm gonna start there. Okay, So what we're gonna do is we're gonna hit print. I just go over here and hit print, and it's going to start sucking that in and start printing it.

And now let me tell you what I did while we're waiting for that to print. So once you're in the print module there on the left hand side there presets or templates that you can create. So once you have done you know, every time you go to print, you have to look at something in set this set that set this set that right. Um, all you have to do in light room is set at once and then save it as a template. And then from then on out you click on it hit print, just like I did hit on hit print. That was it. The only reason I went into the printer dialogue boxes to double check and see if I had done it right? I am. So what you're going to do then, is you're gonna go over here to the right, and you're going to choose what size of papers. So the first thing you do is you have to say, OK, I have to go to my page, set up right over here on the left of the click on it and choose the paper size and the can and printer and all that kind of stuff. So I'm choosing what size of paper and what printer I'm printing, too. And then that's that. Then you would go to the printer settings, and you would choose various printer settings. Now, in our case, we have very specific printer settings on DSO we because it's cancelled paper. When you when you buy cans on paper, you go to their website, and then they tell you on a canon printer. This is the kind of settings you would use to make our paper look great and they even have profiles. You can download their as well to make it look even better. And so what you'll do is in here. You're going to say, OK, quality and media options. Other fine art paper. One is the type. That's what they tell you. This is the most closely associated paper to our paper, so use that. So we use that. Tell it to print with high quality. It's a black and white photo print. You can also print using the color inks in here to print black and white beacon. If you click on black and white photo print it's just going to use all of its gray and black inks instead of using the coloring so that it's totally neutral. If you want to do some kind of a um ah, my God Sienna type are ah ah CP a thing or something like that. You need to turn it on. Even though it's black and white, you've got to give it those colors in order for that to work. So then, once you've done that, you got your paper and your printer set up. Now you got to come over here and you got to decide what it's gonna look like. So I told it to make it as See that I've got a margin of one inch on either left and right and a margin of 1.2 on top and 1.18 on bottom so it will fit within that, and it won't get too close to the edge. You could also tell exactly what size you want that cell to be, So in this case it's 10 by 16 ish, but I could tell it I want a 11 by 14 square, and then whatever's in it is gonna be in it. Okay, so you're setting all this up? You could put some water marks or whatever on it, but we're obviously not going to do that. And then at the very bottom, this is where all the details are. This is where it gets tricky. So first you can print to a J peg or you can print to the printer we're gonna print to the printer resolution print resolution when you save and send out toe like White House custom color somewhere that's gonna print to photographic paper, you send him a 300 DP I because that's generally the right dp I for most printers, but a printer an inkjet printer prints at 2 40 That's kind of its normal, which is great, because you can, actually, if you have a print on image that's too small because you cropped it in too much. But you needs, and someone wants you to print it bigger than you're comfortable with. Go to an inkjet printer and print it with that, and you get a size increase based on the fact that you only need to 40 dp I on an inkjet printer, whereas on a a photographic paper, you need 300 g p I. So you actually get like I don't know. It's like a 20% size increase or whatever. So choose your printer correctly. There's also other printers out there that prefer, like 1 60 D P I and stuff. So if you if you're in a situation where you need to get the print larger, choose a different printer and that we usually help you. Okay, in all of your professional labs will know what the best. Dp I So go into the lab and say, Hey, what's the lowest beautiful DP I printed you've got and then print to that one and then you'll have a bigger print. Okay, so, um, so we print at 2 40 dp I I added a little bit of print sharpening to it just kind of crisp it up on the way out, especially when it's on like a rag paper. It's a little softer feeling. If you were on glossy paper, that's much more, um, crisp to begin with. And then I tell it, It's Matt paper, so I have to tell it that. And then I'm printing 16 bit, so that's pretty nice. It's printing a bit image out to this printer. So all the data that I have is going to the printer, Um, and then, which is much different than sending out an eight bit J peg s RGB and sending it off to a printer. So that's why that's how you can. That's why when you print at some other printer, you're gonna get a little bit darker blacks, and you're not gonna get quite as much detail on things as when you print on a really good inkjet printer. You'll get more detail in things, so but it's, you know, trade off because you have to learn how to do it and you have to baby it, and you have to make sure you buy the inks and you know to keep the inks running and you have to keep printing. If you buy a printer and you let it sit for six months, then you're wasting your because you have clean out the in Cadden. So just it needs to be something that you views before you decide to buy a printer. Okay, so then, after you've chosen 16 bit, then you're gonna go into color management, and that's where things are really critical. So when you're in your color management, what you want to do is you want to do a perceptual so you can do relative or perceptual. Perceptual is based on your perception. So it's going to say, What does this person see here? I'm gonna try and replicate what they see on their screen here on the printer. That's perceptual. Andi, What you're gonna do is you're gonna tell it to print. Are you gonna tell to print with this profile and so you can choose your profile here. So these are the profiles that come with the paper so you can download them and it will install. And it'll print the way that the printer, the people who made the paper, think it should print on this particular printer on DWhite. You install him, it just installs them into the right place. Um, or you can actually use your own print Calibrate er And so I've actually calibrated. And so this is a I one pro calibrate er it's made by X, right? And so they're they're the same people that make this. So we calibrate our camera on the way in. We make sure that we calibrate our screen does every recalibrate their screen. You got to calibrate your screen. Otherwise, you have no idea what you're looking at. So the screen is calibrated, the cameras calibrated, the printers calibrated. You print out this and then this runs over the top of all of those squares and says, Oh, this printer on this paper makes green look a little bit too blue green. So then it combat sit So it's dead on accurate to this particular printer on this particular day on these particular inks, like it's so specific that it's dead on accurate. Whereas if you just use the profile for the paper that you got, it's just for generally canon printers and this paper. It's for generally this printer, but maybe not that set of inks that came out of the factory that day or whatever. So it's very, very specific. It's really nice to be able to to specifically No, this is calibrated dead on accurate for this printer. Okay, so we calibrate that, and then we would just put those into the profile, so I'm going to show you where those profiles are. Just so you're aware of it. If you go up to this on a Mac on a PC, you got to figure out what that is. I don't know where the location is, but you can find it. In our case, we're going to go to the library and inside the library in applications Support in Adobe. If you go inside of adobe here, you will find an area here called light room and inside of light room. There's a folder called Color Profiles. Any color profile that you have for a particular paper. If you shove it into this folder, it will show up in light room, and that's where we're getting these color profiles here, and I could just choose them. So if you you can you can calibrate any kind of paper that you get from anywhere. I can calibrate stuff from White House custom color so that I get exactly I know exactly what it's gonna look like when it sends to them. Um, I can calibrate this printer. I can do all sorts of calibration. Plus, if you're printing somewhere, they most likely have a profile that could send to you so that you could put in here. So that way you always know what it's gonna look like in the develop module. You could come in and you can just go in and say soft proofing. You click on soft proofing in the toolbar and it shows you what it's gonna look like on whatever given paper. So I can actually click on this And I can say, What's it gonna look like on this Moab paper? And it will show me exactly what it would look like. I can see how much paper like is the paper. Yellowish is a white, is it? So it'll show me what it's gonna look like. All right, so But back to the print module, the other thing that you can change is if you find that when you're printing stuff out, it's a little too dark or it's not contrast enough, then you do this print adjustment, and that helps to kind of tweak it So you can say, Oh, it needs to be a little bit brighter and a little bit more contrast in. You can see ivory done that. I've done plus 20 on brightness and plus four on contrast, once you get that and you like it and you test printed it and you're like, Oh, that looks pretty good. Then what you do is you come over here and put the hit this plus button and you're gonna say cannon pro one with Kansan felon paper, and then you're gonna hit, create. And that creates a particular template that when you want to print, you just know. I put in the 13 by 19 paper from cancer and it's in my canon printer. I click on that hit print. I never have to set any of that up again. All right, so this is coming out and we will see what it looks like. I think it's it might almost be that it's almost done.

Ratings and Reviews

rorofot
 

This course is a good overview and I love the way Jared teaches. But the course mixes basic lightroom handling with intermediate portrait photography and really expensive gear. Which person, that doesn't know the basic importing and editing in lightroom, has three studiolights from profoto with grid or a calibrating system for the inkjet printer?? And be aware, it's only about LR-editing and nothing about photoshop. But over all it's a good overview for beginners - alas not for intermediate users.

TIm Smith
 

I usually don't write reviews, but thought Jared did a great job presenting the material. Clear, concise and didn't talk excessively fast. Material was well organized and reasons were given for why something was done a certain way. The fill lighting technique was something different and plan on using. The discussion on tones, textures, clothing and background were also helpful when discussing black and white.

Amy Vaughn
 

I haven't shot much with the intention of turning the photos black and white, but this class piqued my interest in trying it. This class isn't just about how to turn any photograph black and white, but how to think about the photo as you're shooting for black and white. I especially appreciated Jared's explanations about the importance of texture, creating drama and carefully targeting lights.

Student Work

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