by Jack Martin
The other night, some of us photography geeks watched a Zoom presentation by Drew Hendrix, president of Red River Paper on photo printing. His presentation was very informative on the printing process.
I have found the Red River Paper website very helpful. There is a ton of information there, especially about different types of paper. Choosing a paper can be frustrating. The articles I have read usually tell you to “experiment” and find out what you like. One thing that most paper manufacturers have is a sample pack. I have personally done this and still am trying to learn more.
www.redriverpaper.com
If you are looking to buy a printer, you can call Red River at 214-637-0029 and they will ask you 4 simple questions and then give you their recommendations. This is a great starting point and shortens the list.
So what are the steps in printing? I will list a combination of Drew’s tips along with my experience.
Calibrate your monitor with an external calibration device. These can be done with Datacolor Spyder or Xrite ColorMunki. Monitors are calibrated at the factory and brightness and color saturations vary. The only way to set these parameters to a standard is to calibrate.
Softproof before printing. This is a tool in your processing software that helps emulate what your image will look like on the paper you will be printing. If you do not know what softproofing is, try to learn how to do it, you will be rewarded.
Set your printer settings. This will vary from printer to printer. While at first this may be intimidating at first, it is very simple if you go through it step by step and becomes second nature. Don’t forget to set ICC profiles and turn off the function where the printer wants to make adjustments.
For printing, Drew recommended to slightly increase contrast, vibrance, and sharpening. This is kind of an experimenting thing but helps because the ink spreads out just a little on the paper and loses a little from your monitor.
This is a short version of printing, if you have questions feel free to contact FCC through the website if a non member and members can use Google Groups.