3 Tips I Learned When Making My First Professional Prints
Gallery Prints:
Over the last month I prepped and printed 5 gallery quality images so that I could showcase my work for the first time to a small artist run gallery in San Francisco. This was a prerequisite for the second stage of the interview process with the galery and I wanted to share with you my experience making professional prints for the first time.
To start things off it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the options out there when it comes to printing, such as medium, paper type, and even which printshop you go with as they all have an affect on how your work will look.
One of the first decision you should think about is if the print shop you want to use is local or not as this will have an affect on how easy it is to create your first set of prints.
The Benefits of Printing Local:
There are many benefits when printing locally that will typically save you time and money. First you can simply go to many of these local shops to see examples of their finished work, you can speak to someone directly about printing best practices, and they can walk you through each step of the process.
For example, they can advise you on the best format to send in your images for printing and show you how your images would likely look like on their computers which have been calibrated to match their printing process. This is a big one as what you see on your screen may be different when it’s printed with respect to color and brightness. I will touch further on this later in the post because it’s so important. Some shops will even help you make adjustments to your images to create a better print which is again helpful if you’re not sure of what techniques to apply when prepping your images for print. Lastly by printing locally you can develop a relationship with the print shop and you’re supporting a local business which is always a good thing.
Working with Prints Shops Further Away:
If you don’t print locally it does make the process a bit more difficult and potentially more costly as it will be up to you to take the necessary steps to ensure your images are print ready. You may have to go this route if your local print shops do not offer the type of printing you’re looking for or you simply love the work of a certain shop and want your print done by them.
This is actually what happened to me as I came across the printer WhiteWall while in NYC and I just loved their quality. I saw their work when visiting Lumas Gallery, a photographic gallery focusing on attainable and unique art. When I visited the gallery I was not just blown away by the artists represented but how the photographs looked under acrylic glass. I knew this was the way I wanted to print my future images and had confidence in the print shop after seeing all the work in the gallery. The print shop also had an office space within Lumas to showcase all the different styles of printing they offered and representative onsite was also very helpful in explaining their process.
Now over a year since that visit I was ready to print my first set of professional looking images. I wrote a bit before on how to narrow down which images to print here, however as I was going to showcase in front of a gallery I wanted to select images that worked well together but would also stand out from other photography work featured in the gallery. I therefore decided on the below 5 images I took last year in NY:
The following sections will go over what I did to print my finished work and some helpful tips I learned on the way.
Tip 1: Request a Sample Pack:
If you’re working with a print shop that was not local to you like I was, you can often ask them for a Sample Pack which showcases the papers and mediums they print out of. This is very helpful if you’re not sure what options to go with and you want to see samples of their work. For example with Whitewall I could request this on their site here and they essentially make it free if you end up placing in an order with them.
This was helpful for me as even though I had seen their work in person and knew that I wanted to go with acrylic prints I was not sure between two HD paper options they offered, a metallic or standard paper.
I was lucky in that I was given a sample pack when I visited last year and I spent time going through the samples again to get a better feel for the two types of paper.
Tip 2: Create Test Prints
Even after seeing the metallic and regular print samples I was still on the fence so next I did a round of test prints with each paper. To save on costs I chose to print 4x6 prints and some sites like Whitewall will even offer a lower cost print option for testing purposes. This does not produce a lower quality print but they watermark the images with “Photographic Test Print” so they can offer you a sample for evaluation at the lower cost.
Before you order the first print you’ll want to check what file formats they support and also check the printing settings selected during the ordering process as some sites like Whitewall will offer to auto enhance your image for brightness/color for you. This is likely very helpful for someone more casually printing but I wanted to ensure my work was as close to what I originally intended so I made sure this was not selected.
Once I placed the order I just had to wait for the samples to come in which can take some time due to shipping distance.
Once I got the prints I was so excited to see what my phots looked like in each format. I laid them out in front of me and compared the prints with each other and then with my computer.
Now that I could see the print types side by side with my images I knew that for these set of images I liked the color on the standard HD printer paper. However I also realized my first mistake.
Metallic vs Non Metallic Print. A bit hard to tell in this image but you can tell when holding the photograph.
As I was printing with rather vibrant colors I immediately saw a shift in a couple of the colors in my prints vs what I saw on my computer. I was thankful I did the test to catch this early on before spending a ton of money on the final prints, but there were things I could have done with my images before the test prints to get more consistent colors and I’ve outlined this in the next tip.
Tip 3: Color Calibration
The color shift I saw was because I did not setup my images so they matched the same colors as the printer WhiteWall uses and the fact that my monitor was not calibrated.
Calibrating your monitor ensures that the colors and brightness of your screen are true to what your computer is trying to display. As you probably noticed when looking at your images on different devices such as your phone vs your computer they appear different. This is because those screens are calibrated differently by the manufacturer.
To calibrate a monitor it requires a specific devices which will actually reads the colors and brightness of your monitor and guides you on what adjustments to make. I had a very old one but unfortunately it was no longer supported by the company so I could not get it to work on my computer. So I decided at a minimum to view my images in an environment with even lighting and to work on my images with 50% brightness to hopefully even out the tones.
The printer color space profile was next and this is where I saw an obvious shift in color. I’m not a color or print expert by any means, but from what I understand computers and printers have specific colors spaces which simply dictates the range of colors they can display. In general computers have a wider range than printers and this is where you can see shifts because if your computer colors is out of range of what the printers can produce the colors will end up shifting.
The way to overcome this is to load in the specific printer’s color profile you intend to print with on your machine and view your images in that color space. Most professional print sites should provide links to their profiles as you see here with Whitewall, which allows you to download the specific printer profile to your machine.
Once you download and installed the profile you won't see the effects on your images until you open up your editing application and select this profile. I use CaptureOne and saw this when clicking on the Print Process Settings.
Once I navigated to these print options I also came across additional settings for printing such as sharpness and export format which was very helpful.
I was now able to see the color shift. To correct it I simply opened up the original jpg image I sent to the printer in one view and my editing application in another with the profile selected and worked to adjust the printer profile image to as close as possible to the original jpgs image.
I now had an image that would print with colors that matched my original direction with the image. To be extra safe I placed another order in with these adjustments as I wanted to be sure. I also did this because I didn’t have exact monitor calibration and wanted to be sure my adjustments were where I wanted to go. I also used some of the additional export options offered to add a bit of sharpening and exported it as a higher resolution file Tif file. This would provide the printer with more data for printing and I made sure to check that the print shop supported this format which they did.
When I finally got this second batch of images back, I was happy with how they looked and I was now ready to place my order with greater confidence in the final outcome.
Final Thoughts:
As you can tell there is a bit of additional work that had to be done when working with a distant print shop and ordering the test prints adds extra costs to the process. However it’s all doable with some time and patience and it made a big difference as the final product came out better than I could hope for.
Hopefully these tips will help you once you decide to start printing your work. It’s worth the effort and there is nothing like holding a polished piece of your photography in your hands. If you have any other additional questions on this process please feel free to leave a comment.