Making a frame-worthy photo: 10 steps for retouching your image for printing

 

 

As part of their third season of Shooting Stories That Sell, SLR Lounge has released a free video showing off ten steps to retouch your images for print.

While it's nice to view and share images on the web, there's something truly special about a print, so you want to ensure that you're doing everything necessary for preparing your digital file for printing and hanging. Before you even start processing and printing your files, the first thing you must do is calibrate your display. This is absolutely critical and should be a part of your workflow whether you do a lot of printing or not.

If you'll be doing extensive retouching, a pen and tablet is a great tool, something like a Wacom Intuos. I've used one of their tablets for nearly a decade and it's still going strong; a very worthy investment. If you're editing an image specifically for printing, you should be regularly zooming in to your final desired print size to ensure that your edits still look good at 100 percent. It's easy to get sloppy when you are viewing your image at a small size.

It's also important to keep your color space in mind. If you are doing your own printing, Adobe RGB can work nicely -- although SLR Lounge argues that the difference between sRGB and Adobe RGB is negligible -- but sRGB is a very common color space as well. sRGB will always work well whereas Adobe RGB might not, so know what your printer or printing service wants. This also applies to resolution. For the rest of the tips and retouching process, watch the video below.

(Via SLR Lounge)