Raw Transcript
now I want to talk about printing your surf photos so you’ve got to the point where you shot them you’ve processed them and now you’re ready to print what I’ve got at home is a relatively small inexpensive printer is a Canon Pixma but there are lots and lots of different options I’ll put a link below to some comparisons but essentially I went for a photo printer if you go for um if you basically search for a photo printer rather than document printer then you tend to get printers which have a wider range of inks available to them so maybe my I think mine’s got five six or seven ink cartridges and they’re like five different tones and that creates that allows the the printer to create more accurate colors when it’s printing so you’ll find that a4 size prints are the kind of standard for home printers and because of that lots of printers offer that as the maximum size and you can get them really inexpensively so to give you an idea a four is that size so you might remember this shot from some of the examples I made earlier in the fisheye section and I’ll go through how I edited this but essentially up 117th in Lightroom all I do is click on the print tab in the top and that takes you to various different options for paper and interacts with your printer and it’s dead simple to then print out something like this the photo paper itself costs a little bit of money not too much and the ink cartridges are going to be your big investments for whatever photo printer you get so expect to spend more money on ink cartridges after a little while than you did on the printer itself unless you could buy a really big printer so I’ve been really happy with the results from my inexpensive home photo printer from Canon and photos like this I mean I picked up this frame from just like a local home shop home where shop and they’ve quite an inexpensive they look quite cool I mean you can get pretty inexpensive frames and once you’ve bought the paper in the printer and the ink and everything printing one of these out doesn’t cost you very much money at all so I it once you’ve got that then this becomes a really nice inexpensive thoughtful gift for anyone who you’ve surfed with or even members of your family and since buying it then I several of my prints have ended up on the wall in my family and friends home so it’s always nice when you get to see one when you when you go over to someone’s house and you see how that’s a print that I made there’s lots of different and lots and lots of information out there on how to get the best out of your printer I’ve tended to err on the side of using pretty much the default settings and then bit of trial and error and I’ve come up with a pretty reliable system in Lightroom I just increase the vibrance a little bit because it tends to dampen it down a little bit when in print rather than on the screen because it’s not backlit but that’s pretty much it I don’t sharpen in in a particularly different way I just do my normal edits and then increase the vibrance a little bit and print it simple as that I’m pretty much always happy with results I have a lot of people will recommend that you get a color calibration device for your monitors because not everyone’s monitor is the same and not all printers are the same what that does is essentially you attach something to your computer and then you pop that onto your monitor normally it’s like a little puck like a USB puck style thing spiders SP yde are the ones one that I had I haven’t got any more but you put it on the front of your monitor you run a bit of software and it calibrates it and it makes sure that the colors are what they should be on your monitor and it sets up a color profile that you can then use with your printing software and stuff like that I used it a few times and you’re supposed to rerun it whenever you change like the environment you know your monitors in and after every couple of months or so I think but I found that I I could bear you know it’s the difference between it uncalibrated and calibrated perhaps I was lucky I’ve got reasonable monitors I’ve got two monitors and they’re dead I think they’re just kind of fairly standard Dell monitors but they do seem to my eye they do a reasonable job and I think if you work with an iMac like any sort of Mac OS device they tend to have nice well calibrated displays as far as I know I don’t have one myself I use them quite a bit and if you’re going to be sending your files out to a printer to get them printed this is where it really becomes quite important to know at least roughly what it’s going to look like at the other end so for me as I said I’ve got a printer that Brink’s a for maximum you can buy printers that print bigger but they kind of go up leap up in price quite a bit after a4 and naturally you’re paying more for the paper and using a lot more ink so you pay more think so a 4 I think is a really good compromise of value for amateur surf photographers like myself so if you’re gonna go for that for your kind of home prints and that deals with 90% of the printing needs I have but if you want to go bigger which you probably will want to do once you’ve got a few really nice surf images that you like then you’re probably gonna send it out to someone else so there’s a lot of places print shops that will take a digital file and send you back a print pretty straightforward and most of them or most of the good ones will offer a color profile which you can download it’s basically like a little file that you download and then you can plug that into software like Lightroom for instance or Photoshop and you do what’s called soft proofing which basically means it tries to show you on your screen what it will look like on the paper that you’ve chosen when printed with the settings that you’ve put in your file so I’ve done that a couple of times as well and I did that for the blurb book magazine that I made rather and I did that a long time ago I’ll put a link below to my full experience went with blurb magazines but I’ve actually lost the magazine that I printed got printed for myself so I’m gonna have to do another one soon and I’d like to redo my overview because they’ve announced new software since then and there’s different ways of doing it and so anyway they give you a color profile that you can check and think okay perhaps I need to change the cars a little bit alright personally I’ve never gone back in and edited the colors afterwards um if you’re printing for like fine art surf prints for sale in a gallery or something like that I would definitely recommend seeking out the advice of a print shop a lot of the people who a lot of the professional staff talkers who do it print their own and there’s lots of I’ll put link below there’s eugene turn from anchor bumps has a lots of information on that the way he does it and pictures behind the scenes in his gallery when he’s printing and it’s fascinating stuff and I think it’s once you’re I’m entering that space and you’re getting when you’ve got money coming in from that then it’s worth investing a lot of time and money in that personally like I say a four prints with a cheap frame is a about as far as I’ve gone but I have sent some stuff off I have got it printed and brought back so to give you an idea this is na3 print again it’s just like a cheap IKEA frame I think so that was a nice black and white one a bit more of an abstract style shot but that’s just to give you an idea of what the an a3 print might look like if you’re looking for that kind of size and that’s for like a normal sized room that’s maybe as big as you want to go for me if you’ve got a nice sometimes you want that statement piece that’s just the first thing you see when you walk in the room and everyone kind of wants to go up and have a look good look at it that’s where bigger print sizes come in and things like canvases I’ll show you one in a moment that’s probably a bit bigger this screen but just before I do that another kind of specialist style of print I’ve had done is printing on aluminium and it’s I got them got this one from Sal digital who are a European company I think they’re based in Germany but lots of print shops do it and it’s really hard to tell but this is just literally like a a sheet of it’s like aluminium with some sort of I guess it’s like a plastic material sandwiched in between the two sheets just playing on the back and I’ve got that mounted in my bathroom because being metal it’s far more resistant to moisture and dampness and things compared to like a paper print basically and that’s held up really well and I quite like it hasn’t faded at all it’s um it’s been up there for Wow 18 months or so in there in there I think in the bathroom and looks the same as I did when I first when it first arrived but yeah if you’re going for somewhere if you want something a bit different or if you’re looking for something that’s going to stand up to a bit more abuse than a standard print then have a look at into an aluminium one because I really like mine and have done another one yet but I’ve got space in my bathroom to put another one up I don’t think so that’s another little something else you can try again there’ll be a colour profile available for that if you do want to get it printed in that form so the next last one I guess is a canvas style print and I’ll show you a really big one that I had done I think was actually gift for me based on one of my photos so I can’t even see that camera now yeah it’s way too big for you to even see but you get the idea it’s massive so you can go really big but um I’ll be honest it’s quite hard to find a space for that in an average house like I say it’s a statement piece you want in you might want it above a sofa in a front room or above a fireplace or something like that but um it’s just to say that is possible and it’s not can’t doesn’t have to be really really expensive if you’re printing your own images if you wait for a deal and stuff like that but if you’re going to be offering prints to other people to buy then all these different sizes are probably what you’re going to be offering and potentially all these different styles as well it’s just so you know that there’s so many different options available out there and but if you wanted to get started then grab a name for photo printer buy a bunch of these frames head down to Ikea or wherever your nearest kind of home hardware shop is pick up some relatively inexpensive frames and get a few printed do a bit trial and error it was really really fun I in fact this session I remember I shot this and I I knew I was gonna print it I I was looking through as I got out of the surf I looked through my and reviewed my images on the back of camera I saw this one I was like that’s it that’s the one I wanted I’ve been waiting for this shot for quite a while I’ll explain in more detail if you watch the post-processing video on this one and so I got it I knew I came home I did some processing in Lightroom I printed it I had a frame already so I stuck it up and then so I shot it and within an hour and a half of finishing that session it was on the wall and it’s been there ever since and that’s such a great feeling to have I think it’s a lot more rewarding than if I posted that on Instagram and it was scrolled past within a few hours probably no one would have seen it anymore and yes it’s just a permanent reminder of that day that session but I think if you or if you’re watching this video you might be looking more on the angle of selling it in which case I think you’re gonna have to deal with a print shop to fulfill all your orders that’s gonna be the best way to do it it’s certainly going to be the quickest way and most efficient way for you in terms of your time and your money to get bigger prints or different styles of prints out to other people and there’s a lot of print shops that do it up a link below to and some more resources on that but hopefully this has given you a really quick insight into what you should look for in terms of getting started with printing your own Sur photos
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