hjkarten wrote:
Many thanks to the various UHH participants for their useful hints, judgments and evaluations.
I am considering pursuing the purchase of a suitable printer, but am a bit hesitant because of the steep learning curve. Do any of you have suitable beginner's level primer on color printing that you might recommend?
With apologies to the people who point out the paradox of spending a lot of money on gear, and hesitating on spending money on printing, my goal is to find the most economical protocol for my everyday images. I might suggest that the vast majority of digital images of field photographers are posted on internet sites, and are only very rarely actually printed as hard copies. Under the critical assessment of evaluating hard copies of seemingly desireable photos, I am benefitting from learning about a totally novel aspects of looking, learning and finally seeing yet another set of skills associated with photography.
As an example of such a learning curve, I delight in realizing that my photos have greatly improved as a result of shifting from film to digital images. This is partly due to the major difference, when shooting a bird in flight, in the cost of shooting 30 to 50 photos on film, versus shootiing that many photos of a bird with a digital camera. The digital images are essentially a "free" set of images. This encourages exploration, and is evident to my various bird watching photographer-friends, as they all comment on how their photos are greatly improved since the introduction of the latest generation of mirrorless digital cameras. As I now greatly increase the number of photos that I consider worthy of printing, it includes consideration of what I should be looking to see in the final prints. One of the many points that I now include, when assessing my images, is a far more critical attention to white balance, ISO, noise levels, background, color contrast, focus, tracking, etc. THe use of inexpensive 4x6 prints, (even from CVS) has been helpful. I don't think it requires an apology for trying to keep costs down while pursuing my learning curve.
Many thanks to the various UHH participants for th... (
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All of my earlier suggestions apply equally to home and lab printing. The absolute first step is calibrating and custom profiling a good monitor. If you can't see, accurately on the monitor, what you want to print, you'll waste a lot of money on processing or ink and paper, and you'll blame your lab or printer for something that is not their fault!
I'm partial to Epson color, especially that from their pigment ink printers in the P-Series. However, if you never print borderless*, their 8500 and 8550 Ecotank dye ink printers are a good value. Use larger paper than the print requires, and use software to make best use of your paper. *I never print borderless with inkjet. They say it can do it, but at the cost of over-spraying ink all over the inside of the printer, which ruins subsequent prints!
> Print 12x18 or 11x14 or four 6x9s or 5x7s on 13x19 paper.
> Print any combination of 8x10, 4x5, 5x7, 4x6, 3.5x5, and wallet-size prints that will fit, on 8.5x11 paper.
I strongly recommend Adobe Lightroom Classic for printing, because it allows you to create layouts for any combination of prints you want. It also allows direct conversion of Raw files you've adjusted, straight to the printer/paper/ink profile needed for best output with the widest possible color gamut.
At the same time, NEVER, EVER think you will save money by printing at home unless you make very large prints that labs charge a small fortune to make!
Printing your own work is for:
> Control freaks who understand color management and want the very best color and tone they can get.
> Privacy... Sensitive subject matter doesn't get viewed by lab personnel.
> Immediacy... You can go from camera to post-processing to print in minutes.
> LARGE prints... If you are a pro or artist selling museum-quality prints larger than 11x14, rolling your own makes far more sense than labs. You get to choose the paper surface and size, make small tests before committing large amounts of paper and ink, and then control the quality of output directly.
> CHOICE of paper weights, surfaces, and textures... DOZENS of different brands and paper surfaces are available, along with generic ICC profiles for most higher end inkjet printers from Canon and Epson. A few exotic papers may require custom profiles (and a profiling kit to make them).
I hope that helps...