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Printing and Troubleshooting

Lesson 12 from: Photoshop Mastery: Fundamentals

Ben Willmore

Printing and Troubleshooting

Lesson 12 from: Photoshop Mastery: Fundamentals

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

12. Printing and Troubleshooting

Lesson Info

Printing and Troubleshooting

The printing part I'm not going to go too much depth in because for a couple reasons it's relatively simple and photo shop and I don't print from photoshopped most the time I print from adobe light room my images are stored in light room to organize them. I use photo shop to do a lot of editing like retouching and layers and all that, but when I'm done it goes back in the light room and within light room are settings for sharpening when I output the picture and settings for sharpening what I print the picture and that's where I usually do my sharpening so I'm not as comfortable printing it in photo shop and but let's take a look at ah to print an image and I don't know what set up on this particular machine it's not my machine but you go to the file menu and she's print I just want to give you basic overview of some of the things you find in here at the top is usually where you choose your printer. It looks to me like no one's ever installed a printer on this machine it's only used for...

giving seminars but anyway usually click there to choose your printer if you click on print settings, this will get you to the settings that air for that particular printer um you can go in there and tell us what general settings the same kind of settings you would have win you go from any other program to print below that we have the layout which means just to wave a horizontal or vertical picture and then down here we ever setting so let's briefly looking are settings something is going to need to compensate for the color change that you might get when printing to your printer each printer give you a slightly different result if you go print to a canon printer and print the exact same file to a epson printer, the results will look so different they have different inks sets in them different papers and all that you can't expect the exact same results so you can either have photoshopped try to compensate for what the printer would make the image look like or you can have your printer driver the software that runs your printer compensate but you don't want to have both having both would be like wearing contact lenses and reading glasses at the same time you're compensating twice you want either the glasses or your contact lenses not both guys so right here you choose where either photo shop or your printer software manages the color I'm gonna have fun or shot managed the color so we could do it right here here is where you choose the profile for your printer usually with when you buy a prayer it comes with a cd and in on the cd is a little install package where installed your printer driver and with that and installs some profiles these days some of the newer printers force you to get that information online but you need to install the printer driver and at the same time you usually get profiles you need a profile for each kind of paper that you'd print on so I put on like premium glossy for some of my images that I go to something called exhibition fiber for my fine art prints and I would have a profile for each you can obtain those from the manufacturer the printer um and you would choose one here and in here here are some of them right here this is for on eppes and three thousand which is the kind of values and here would be one for premium glossy paper which is what I use is my default paper one of just doing normal prince and then I go toe something else that it's notas exhibition fiber for my fine art stuff so anyway I would choose it right here below that you have the choice of normal printing or hard proofing normal pretty means you just want a good look in print of your image hard proofing means I want to simulate a different device I want to simulate what this image would look like if printed in the newspaper I want to simulate what this image would look like reprinted on a cardboard box. That kind of stuff. That's what hard proofing is? And right here what's his proof set up. You would tell it what kind of set up you would use for that kind of printing. If you're going to convert to seem like a mode and do newspaper printing, you'd have to choose the proper profile from here. It's not something. Usually people that air into the basics get into so usually normal printing. Here we have simple descriptions for where it's placed you want to center it within the sheet of paper? Or would you like to type in where you'd like it? Like an inch from the left and then from the pop? And would you like to scale the image or use it in its current size? Right now? It's cropping my image because it was a really big image that I shot I can just hit scaled fit media and it will fit it within the printable size, and it tells me over here after scaling it down, how bigger the pixels? And so I just need a glance that that make sure it's within the range that I mentioned for various kinds of printing main thing is making sure it's not too low. If it's too low, then it will look pixelated. If you don't want it that size just turn that off and you can print it the size that set up foreign photoshopped or type in a new within height down here is his prints selected area that's if I had a selection active on my picture I could say only print this part like one person's face or one particular part of my image below that we have choices for crop marks corner crop marks that's if I was going to cut it out and I was going to use an exacto maybe cut through if it had a white background on the photo where I can't tell exactly where the image ended that might be useful but these air mainly used by printing companies to put little registration marks and other things that are used for printing when you turnem on though you will see various things like the label will be your file name by default the description nothing will show up until you have the edit button and then I could type something in and now I can have that text there so I might know why didn't make this print wise it's set on a wall was it tio do different things below that we have functions you can usually ignore those these are for people that work at putting companies if somebody is outputting a negative which is what is sometimes used for going to the printing process the process action after creating the negative is to create a printing plates and other things ah, motion down would reverse your image because it means the image is going to be used upside down negative would make it a negative you don't usually need to do that background would fill in this an empty area right here border would add a black border around your picture and bleed would make it a little bigger then what you've actually asked for so that it could be used to trim something a little larger, the white stuff you don't usually need postscript options only going to really be in there if you're working out a postscript printer but calibration bars and things can be like little color swatches at the end usually not to mess with it. So if you look at the settings, the action I actually have to mess with usually it's mainly a printer profile and if I had a good printer profile selected there's one other thing which is this menu um which is the rendering intent? Ah with rendering intent we have a few different choices in here and I'm not an expert on these things by any means whatsoever, but the main thing is I would not use the choice called saturation that's mainly for business graphics if what's most important to you is that the colors in your image are very vivid then using this particular setting is going to not try to make the photographic image look good necessarily, but if you had solid areas of color it's going to keep them nice and vivid that type of thing if on the other hand I'm doing a photographic prints, then I would usually switch between perceptual, which is right here uh and the one that is called relative kaulder metric relative is the default if you want to know what the actor those do, I don't know if I'll have the best description of it, but what they mainly are trying to do is deal with colors that are not principle if your printer is not capable of printing is vivid of of a blue as what you have in your picture this is in general how is it going to deal with it? And if I come in here and choose perceptual, I believe it's going to shift the out of uh the unprintable colors so that their principal many mellow them out and then shift everything else in the picture the same amount so that things have the right relationship between each other that maintains that relationship if I choose relative on the other hand, it will shift on lee the colors that are outside of the printable range, leaving the colors that were principal looking fine, so usually I want to switch between perceptual in relative one of those two is going to give me the best looking result but relative this fine to start with absolute is only mainly used when printing calibrations stuff if you're going to make a profile for your printer or something like that usually wouldn't use it for photographs so either processional or relative photograph down at the bottom we have a few choices gamut warning is going to put a color on top your image anywhere you have colors that are not printable on your printer mean they're too colorful and that's where is going to shift the color within your image show paper white is going to try to show you within this uh what you're much would look like on the kind of paper you're putting on that kind of stuff but I don't want to spend too much time on that because we have one other thing to cover and we only have a few minutes to cover it and that would be troubleshooting so see if I can find an image to work with well go on open this one and let's see if I can get it to mess up if I can get it to mess up then I can try to figure out how to fix it now first thing is if you're going to experiment a lot with an image I would go to the window menu choose history and in history there's a little picture of a camera bottom, before you start experimenting where you know you're going to do extensive experimentation, click on the camera icon that's going to take what's known as a snapshot. All that does is it remembers the current state of your document boop that way, if I screw up, if I do more than twenty steps, remember, you get twenty on news by default. If I click on the name of the snapshot that was made, it will always get me back to the way the image looks right now. All I'm saying is, I'm not sure if I'm going to screw up the image next or I'm going to do a good job, so as a safety measure, I'm gonna create a snapshot so I could always get back to what the image looks like right now. So I screw anything up, I can always do that if here's one thing that could mess up, which is I run out of hard drive space, if you run out of hard drive space, that means you're gonna get a message that says scratch disk is full that's where it keeps track of all your undoes and other things you've done to your picture, and if you ever hard drive that's getting full, it might fill up completely and then you can't do anymore. The problem is, if you're scratched, this gets full that means your hard drive's full how can I save the picture then? There's no space on my hard drive. Well, if that's the case go to the edit menu that's we're going to find a choice called purge in purge is where you can purge your clipboard which means if you copy and paste it it's still storing whatever you copied somewhere it's taken up memory you can purge your history is which means all your undoes that clear up some hard drive space or you can clear all if I clear all it's going to clear up all my undoes is going to clear out my snapshots it's going to clear out the clipboard and everything else that's going to free up memory and hard drive space so if you ever get your hard drive full but I have to save this image, try that if you get scratched iscause full message all the time like multiple days in a row, then go to your preferences in underperformance and your preferences there's a setting right down here for scratched discs it's going to list every hard drive you have connected, turn on the little check box next to your other hard drives if you have more than one, what that will do is if it fills one hard drive instead of beeping at you and saying you're scratched, discuss full is switch over to the second hard drives and start using it for space too, not for saving files and things that's where you decide where the image goes, but for keeping track of undoes and your clipboard and all that other kind of stuff it will then be able to use more than one dr you have to restart photoshopped, though before it can do that, so you have to quit start back up then simple things if something is just not working, one of the most common things that I do is I will go to the select menu and just see if the choice called de select is available. If that's not great out, it means there's a selection on your screen somewhere it might be one pixel in size somewhere in the corner you don't realize it's there, but we have a selection you can only change the area that selected and so if something's not working there might be a selection I'm not aware of. You can hide selections but having command age, religion, windows maybe had done that, but if I go to this select menu in d select is available, it means there's a selection somewhere I might want to choose d select now if I go back up there, see how it's great out that just tells me there's no selection anywhere active on my screen because that's one thing that could really mess with me, the other thing I'll do is look at what layer is active. If I'm trying to do something, it might be that no layer is active, so photoshopped has no idea where to put the paint your park trying to paint with it has no idea what layer you want to work with access, or you might have more than one layer active that's, fine from moving or scaling, but if I go over here and I try to run a filter, filters can only work in one layer at a time. If I try to paint it, I can do it toe one layer at a time, and so these things will become great out because it doesn't know what layer you want to put it on. So glance at your layers and see are none of them active or is more than one that could be what's messing you up. If you're trying to paint on a mask, let's, say what I would do is look at your paintbrush tool in look at the top of your screen up here at these settings, is it in normal mode in are the opacity is at one hundred. If not, that might be why it's acting weird? Maybe the opacity is a ten percent, which means it's only giving you ten percent of the paint you're asking for. Maybe the opacity is set to something weird. You don't even know what it does, but somehow you bumped it, got it there, so ever tool is not working quite right go to the tools options are here in the options bar on the left side, you'll see a copy of the tool icon, right? Click on it, there'll be a choice or resetting all the settings, then try that tool again, then two other three other things actually look at the icons of the top of your layers panel these ones right here are any of them turned on that locks various aspects of a layer, like locking its position is, which is the one that looks like the move tool locking the pixels that make up the layers you can't change him, that kind of stuff? Are there any of those on? They might be preventing you from doing whatever you're trying. The final two things is going to the image menu in checking both the mode of your picture and the bit depth moded bit depth, because certain filters and certain features and fetter shop work a little bit differently when you're seeing why came out. And if you didn't realize he opened a file, maybe somebody gave it to you from somewhere else it's unseen white came out the filters going to give you a slightly different and results especially if you use a filter like in boss look overly dark just won't look right so glance at those rgb mode is usually where I work even if I'm going to end up on uprooting press I work in rgb mode at the very end of the process I might convert to seem like a though if it has to end up on a pretty press and if this gets to sixteen bit mode, then you'll find a lot of your filters just won't be available because there's a lot of them that just don't work in sixteen bit mode, so if my filters air great out, I go to image mode and say, hey, I'm I know weird mode something other than rgb and is it my bit death that's something other than eight bits and that gives you somewhat of a list of some of the things that I check for first thing, though, is there a selection active second thing though, is the layer I was thinking of active or ours it none layers or more than one the other thing you might think of is in your layers panel is it the mask that's active or the image because you might be expecting you replying to filter your trying to blur the picture, the picture is not getting blurry. It all. You don't realize you're working on the mask. You hate working at the picture, so glance at that.

Class Materials

bonus material

Fundamentals Resource.zip
Practice Images.zip

Ratings and Reviews

dennis hartman
 

Great teacher. The course is great even if CS6 seems hard to work on. I brought up my CS6 and did on it what he was teaching. What a learning curve. He made it fairly easy. Thanks for the great help.

a Creativelive Student
 

I have been learning by video for months but nobody ever explained the why to me. Knowing the why makes all the difference. It helps me remember so much better. As a teacher, I need to remember that. Thanks Ben.

agcphoto
 

I wasn't sure how useful I thought this session would be, but, by the time the middle of the second day arrived, I bought the course and the rest of the series as well. Thank you very much Ben Willmore.

Student Work

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