Hi all,

I'm thinking of getting some of my images professionally printed (10x12 or similar) for my portfolio, and I'm wondering whether I'll need to alter my digital processing workflow to get a good result. I read somewhere that you should over-sharpen the image to get a good printed result, but experimenting looks costly! My camera is a 5MP Panasonic FZ20, original files are 2560x1920, and generally come out of the camera carrying a bit of noise.

I see caedes mysteriously hinted at 'other techniques' in the poster prints discussion thread - what are these 'other techniques'?

Any information/ useful links/ advice is most welcome.

David

Just an idea: as far as experimenting goes, could you print part of the image at the 10 x 12 on a standard size printer? This might give you a good enough idea of the quality that the full sized print will be?

probably upsize your file to the size you will br printing at at around 300+ dpi, which is close to what your camera already puts out, then sharpen after that, scaling a sharpened image will make it look like crap, or at least worse than i would be otherwise

hmmmm, okay, some interesting suggestions...

as Carl said, try expanding the image then sharpening it using the unsharp mask in photoshop at an increased radius. Although prints typically dont need to be as sharp as desktop images.

Most of the 'other things" that I was referring to were mainly just photoshop tricks to hide pixelation. For instance I've heard that photos from a good digital camera are often easier to enlarge for printing (with the nearest neighbor method) due to the lack of film grain induced noise.

My suggestion would be to make a test image which has a bunch of small areas of different treatments (like more of less sharpen filter) and then just send that to the printer as a test. For the caedes.net poster I first had Deviant Art print out a test page which included the poster at various sturation levels, a test of the primary colors, and a test of line thickness at various grayscale levels. I also printed it with both a glossy and matte finsh. It only cost me about $20.

Many of the newer digital cameras have the ability to export as RAW (data directly from the CCD in the camera before it goes through any internal processing), rather than using jpeg compression which creates many of the distracting artifacts and noise you're talking about here. Newer versions of Photoshop allow the import of RAW data as well. I haven't experimented with it at all yet - my camera is not as nice as the one you have. But I've read some good articles in recent computer magazines on the subject. If you're interested, I'll dig through and try to give you specific titles and dates.

Unfortunately, the Panasonic only does tiff if I want uncompressed pictures - but the jpeg files aren't particularly heavily compressed, and for the life of me I can't see any difference in quality between the super fine jpegs (2-3 Mb) and the tiffs (12 - 15 Mb). Dealing with noise and sharpening seem to be the biggest problems I'm facing in trying to create good, full size images. I've taken to using as little in-camera de-noising and sharpening as possible, and incorporating neatimage cleaned layers into my photoshop workflow, and it works pretty well for the 1600x1200 images I submit here. The artifacts I get when sharpening the full size 2560x1920 images look like small 5x1 pixel 'shards'. These things appear both horizontally and vertically, but render themselves conveniently invisible when I zoom out.

Essentially, I'm wondering whether final printed photos have a tendency to be softer or less saturated than the computer screen original - I wouldn't be surprised if this varies from printer to printer, and perhaps there is only one way to find out!

nmsmith: Actually the artifacts that I were referring to were those due to a limited resolution, not due to compression: although that shoudl be taken into consideration as well.

From my experience the DeviantArt Print process actually seems a bit darker and more saturated.