Printing Workshop

For this brief, we need to be able to create high quality prints, and in this workshop we could learn how to do this using the university printers. 

We covered setting up print pages to the right size to fit the printer settings, and also went through the different printing settings. 

Things to consider 

• Resize your image to the correct size before setting up the printing pages/layout and other settings.
• It's always best to make a small test print before doing printing the full size image. This allows you to go back and re edited images if they need to be.
• If your image are portrait, always print it as landscape so don’t waste any paper.
• If printing on matt paper, you need to be printing in matt black colour.
• Make sure perceptional is ticked. 
• Black point compensation is on. 
• Super fine best quality is best to choose for the print option. 
• Make sure its on photoshop manages colour. 

I created a new template to give me enough room for 2 horizontal A4 sized images. A4 is 21x29.7 cm. I already previously had the image to the A4 sizes I wanted, so it was easy to add, and know that they would fit perfectly. It is best to leave space around each side. 

We also need to make sure that the resolution is at least 300 pixels per inch. By printing off a small scale image at this quality, we would know for sure that it was at a good standard. 300 means that the images will be a good quality when it is printed large scale too. Before printing the final print we needed to set up a printing page that allows you to print a few samples of your images that shows the same image but different variations, one brighter than the other or maybe darker, to see which one prints the best. To do this always set up a new page and put in the correct sizes of the paper you’ll be printing on. It is important to save paper, ink and by testing before hand could save a lot of wasted time. 

I also found that printing images, showed up some imperfections on the images I hadn't seen before on screen. Also printing showed the true brightness of the image, having the screen set at different brightnesses can effect the image in front of you. 

After testing the prints it was time to print the final images. I made sure the images were edited correctly and set on the template where I needed them. 

For the print settings, I needed to add my own settings to make sure the images fit on the paper I had chosen. I chose matt, as I felt this enhanced my images.

I feel a lot more confident now to be able to set the printer up and decide what settings I need. I feel confident that I can produce a high quality print using the printers at university.