Bobnewnan wrote:
Nope. Even if you use the printer software, it will only show jpeg or tiff available. LR and PS have no way to get out of RAW to the printer, that is a Photoshop function not in the RAW process. Now if you know a way I'd be interested. Eh?
Lightroom has been able to print directly for years. Of course, here's what is REALLY happening:
>>Your raw image is converted to a 16-bit bitmap in an extremely wide-gamut ICC profile.
>>This 16-bit image is displayed as a proxy, converted from the wide gamut color space to your monitor profile, in 8-bits per channel (10 BPC if you have a card and monitor that support that) for viewing.
>>When you print, the output to the printer can be in 8-bits per channel or 16-bits per channel, at the mercy of the printer driver, and the bitmap is converted directly from the wide gamut color space to the paper profile.
This is the workflow used by high end portrait photographers, high end museums, and other professionals who seek the most saturation they can get from their wide format pigmented inkjet printers. If you have a simple office printer, it works for that, too, but probably just in 8-bits per color channel.
Note that TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format. TIFF is a standard image format wrapper for bitmaps that simply tags the bitmap array with information that tells your software how to interpret the data. The tags are necessary when sending files to external destinations, because there are so many different kinds of bitmap! Last I checked, there are over 49 flavors of TIFF, although only a handful are still in common use. Bitmaps printed directly need not be tagged. They are generated on the fly, by software, during the print process. Only the information needed to process the raw file is stored in Lightroom's Catalog or a sidecar file. Of course, you can MAKE a TIFF in whatever flavor a third party lab or service bureau might need...
But, the benefit of printing directly is that you can test a small print on the same system (printer, paper, ink) that will print a larger print, evaluate it, and repeat that process before making a final print in a much larger size. Monitors cannot display the printable gamut of what's in your raw files, so despite using simulation or "proofing" profiles, what looks good on a monitor may still look a little bit flat on printer. Some tweaking of saturation is common.