Teach Yourself Photoshop 4 in 14 Days

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Printing

Even in this brave new world of the Internet, CD-ROM, and other electronic media, printing isn't going away, and it never will. Getting your image to output correctly is as important as any other step in the process of image creation, and that's why it deserves its own chapter.

Printing should be easy, right? Hit the Print command and watch your glorious image emerge on paper. Unfortunately, getting Photoshop images to print well can involve quite a few variables and decisions. In this chapter we'll look at what those are, from choosing a printer through setting up inks, separations, halftones, and other issues.

Choosing a Printer

You know this already: There are lots of printers out there and lots of printing technologies. How you print obviously depends a lot on what printer you're using. In fact, the printer you use can and should influence how you work in Photoshop and how you prepare your image, since you'll want to create a final image that will print best from your particular printer.

An entire book could be written about all the varieties of printers. In this section, I'll make do with a snapshot of what is available: inkjet printers, laser printers, dye-sublimation printers, thermal wax printers, and imagesetters.

Inkjet Printers

At the most inexpensive end of the spectrum are inkjet printers, almost all of which can deliver acceptable-quality color printing (depending on your definition of "acceptable," of course). Examples of inkjets (sometimes also called "bubble jets") include Apple's StyleWriter printers and Epson's Stylus printers.

Inkjet printers are not necessarily PostScript-compatible, which means that some of them can't print PostScript information that might be in your documents. But for most Photoshop images, this isn't a problem.


NOTE: PostScript is basically the page description language that computers and certain kinds of printers use to communicate.

Quality of output varies tremendously on an inkjet printer, from fair to excellent, depending on how much you want to spend. High-end inkjets like the Iris can cost tens of thousands of dollars, but can be perfect for graphics professionals.

Laser Printers

The laser printer is the professional standard, and it's a good balance of price, quality, and speed. Laser printers abound from well-known companies like Apple and Hewlett-Packard.

Most laser printers output 300-600 DPI (or even higher), and are particularly good with halftone and grayscale images (refer back to Day 4, "Color Modes and Models"). Some can subtly alter the size of the printed dots, thus improving quality. Speed is generally better than that of inkjet printers, although they tend to be more expensive.

Dye-Sublimation Printers

Dye-sub printers are expensive photographic-quality printers, but you get what you pay for. The quality is superb. However, these printers use special ribbons and paper, so you can't simply use any paper in them.

Because of the shear magnitude of their price tags, dye-sub printers are usually out of the price range for most users. Many service bureaus provide printing using one of these machines, so you can always output there if you want to.

Thermal Wax Printers

Thermal wax printers also provide excellent quality color output, but at prices comparable to laser printers. In addition, more and more wax printers are now supporting common paper stocks, and not just special paper. So, as you can imagine, these printers are becoming increasingly popular.

Because of the materials they use, thermal wax printers are especially useful for producing transparencies.

Imagesetters

Imagesetters are printers used for medium- or large-scale commercial printing jobs. These large, expensive machines burn the image onto photographic film or paper. That film is then developed and used to make printing plates that are used for the actual printing. We're talking high resolution here: 1,200-2,400 DPI, or even better.

Imagesetters don't print in color, per se. Instead, you have to create a separate image for each color you want printed. These are called separations, and I'll talk more about them later.

Preparing the Image

Here's the best strategy if you know you'll want to print your final Photoshop image: Keep the printer in mind throughout the entire process! Different printers output differently, so knowing your printer enables you to adjust your image for its particular behaviors, and thus guarantee the best possible image on the final printed page. This is particularly true for full-color images.

With that in mind, you should always configure Photoshop to the printer you'll be using, and do this before even considering printing anything important! This configuration involves three different areas: setting up printing inks, separations, and separation tables.

Printing Inks

Choose File+Color Settings+Printing Inks Setup to bring up the dialog box used to control the conversion tables Photoshop uses to define color settings (see Figure 13.1). The primary use of this dialog box is to reconfigure Photoshop's color settings so they match a printout from a new printer or press. This way you're sure that future print jobs will be what you expect based on what you see on your monitor.

Figure 13.1
The Printing Inks Setup dialog box.

You won't have to mess with these settings much, if at all. Photoshop's default settings work well for most mid- to high-end printers, so feel free to skip this section if you don't need it.

For the ever-curious, however, here are the options in the dialog box:

Note that you can also save and load various settings you create via the Save and Load buttons.

Separations

To bring up the Separation Setup dialog box, choose File+Color Settings+Separation Setup (see Figure 13.2). Here you can adjust how Photoshop combines CMYK inks to print colors (see Day 4 for a refresher on CMYK). Again, in the vast majority of situations, you'll never need to touch these settings. Photoshop's default values are excellent. You should only mess around with these settings if your print shop or service bureau tells you to do so and shows you how!

Figure 13.2
The Separation Setup dialog box.

For reference, here are the options in a nutshell:

Separation Tables

With this dialog box (via File+Color Settings+Separation Tables), you can easily save your Printing Inks Setup and Separation Setup settings as a separation table that can be loaded back into Photoshop for reuse (see Figure 13.3). Each separation table contains all the values found in those two dialog boxes. This feature is perfect for switching among different settings if you have access to multiple printers.

Figure 13.3
The Separation Tables dialog box.

Setting up the Page

Okay, our image is ready. Now we have to take care of the page setup. Select File+Page Setup to get to this very important dialog box (see Figure 13.4).

Figure 13.4
The standard Mac Page Setup dialog box.

Important: This dialog box can look different depending on what print driver you have selected! For example, although many Macintosh laser printers use the standard LaserWriter print driver that results in the dialog box you saw in Figure 13.4, other printers ship with their own print drivers. The Epson Color Stylus, for example, ships with a print driver that makes the Page Setup dialog look like what you see in Figure 13.5. Most of the options are the same; they just appear a bit different. You'll also see additional features offered by individual printers.

Figure 13.5
The Page Setup dialog box for my Mac Epson Color Stylus printer.

Let's go through all the standard options one by one. I'll only cover the basic and intermediate settings; if you want to play with the other settings, talk with your print shop. (Note that not all options will be available in every situation.)


NOTE: Later, when you actually hit the Print button (see the next section), you might run into a problem with files that are large in dimension. If the image dimensions are larger than the dimensions of the page you're printing on, Photoshop will tell you. You can then choose to either print anyway, resulting in only part of the image printing, or you can cancel and adjust the Reduce or Enlarge value so the whole image fits on the page.
Photoshop also always prints images at the center of the page. You can't change this, I'm afraid.

Figure 13.6
The Halftone Screens dialog box.

Figure 13.7
The Transfer Functions dialog box.

Figure 13.8
The Photoshop Color Picker on the Mac.

Figure 13.9
The Border dialog box.

Figure 13.10
The Bleed dialog box.

Before you continue, make sure that whatever you want to print is currently visible onscreen. By default, Photoshop prints all visible layers and channels. If you want to print just certain layers or channels, make them the only ones that are visible and then print.

Printing the Page

Let's pull up the Print dialog box using File+Print (see Figure 13.11). The first thing to be aware of is that this dialog box will look different depending on what printer you have, what platform you're running on, and what mode the image is in. Let's look at all the fields and options.

Figure 13.11
The ultimate dialog box: Print.

Figure 13.12
Printing to a file.

So, that's how to print from Photoshop. But as you'll probably discover, printing directly from Photoshop doesn't happen as often as you might expect. Most of the time, images created in Photoshop are brought into another application for final placement and output. Most often these are page layout applications such as PageMaker and QuarkXPress. Photoshop images can even be brought into other image-editing applications such as Painter and Illustrator, and can be printed from there.

The main thing to watch for when printing Photoshop images from other applications is the format of your file. Make sure that it is compatible with the program you're bringing it into; if it's not, believe me, you'll know! For a refresher on the file formats at your disposal, refer back to Day 1, "Photoshop Basics." Other than that, any settings related to the image, such as custom colors or halftone screens, will be automatically brought with the image and survive the trip to the other application.

Summary

Printing Photoshop images isn't difficult; there are just a lot of decisions to make along the way. This chapter discussed those choices, from initially preparing an image for printing, to setting up the page and finally setting the print options. The wonderful thing about printing is that if you don't get a gorgeous printout the first time, you can simply change settings and try again! Provided you have enough paper and ink, of course.


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