Printing a 40" Fine-Art Landscape Photograph

In this video I take you through the process of printing one of my images to 40 inches. I discuss upsizing, sharpening, profiling, soft proofing and hard proofing to get the most out of your images. Sorry that it ended up a bit long!
0:00 - Intro
1:38 - Photoshop Edit Walkthrough
3:25 - Upsizing
5:39 - Getting the screen image size to match the print size
6:49 - Inspecting the image before sharpening
9:48 - Smart Sharpen
15:03 - Masking out noise
17:17 - Secondary sharpening
22:18 - Adding a white border
23:44 - Soft Proofing
29:35 - Converting to an external printer's colour profile
30:48 - Hard Proofing
35:35 - Final Print
Color Management and Colorspaces
• Understanding Colour M...
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[@cragfast06]

Another excellent video Alex. Many thanks. I really liked the tip about zooming in so that the screen image is the same size as the print. Solid gold!

[@alexnail]

No worries, yeah it’s a surprisingly useful tip that one, it stops you going insane with pixel peeping!

[@thomastuorto9929]

Excellent video. I'm glad to see I am not the only one that waste (not really when striving for perfection) Paper & ink to dial in a print.

[@alexnail]

Oh you have to if you want the best final result!

[@DreamBig]

Thanks Alex, this video goes into my archive library. Very precise and detailled for a non printing geek like me ! 😀

[@alexnail]

Glad you liked it!

[@DaveMorrow]

That turned out really nice. Great shot man.

[@alexnail]

Cheers Dave. I have just a few of these mega green images from the Drakensberg when the light was just perfect and they're always exciting to print (mostly for me!)

[@douglasritchie2836]

Super looking print Alex, nothing beats seeing a large print of your own work and even better when it's an order, wonderful print from an amazing area.

[@alexnail]

Thanks Richie, yeah printing is awesome :)

[@MegaDwilkinson]

Brilliant video Alex, thanks. learned heaps and applied it today to a print of am image from Tasmania that I took last week,. Made a real difference to the print. I have the same image that worked on, on my wall, from our time together in the Berg! All the best - David

[@alexnail]

Thanks David. I guess I will have to break some of these subjects down into separate videos at some point, particularly the proofing sides, but this video was too long already :P

[@anthonmyl]

Grazie! ))

[@josephcampisi5401]

What a fantastic image Alex. Wow.

[@alexnail]

Thanks Joseph!

[@JordanMarsh0217]

Lots of good info in here Alex. Excellent work, print looks terrific.

[@alexnail]

Cheers Jordan, I think this image made a particularly nice print!

[@timnevellphotography]

Thanks for this Alex, great tutorial as it really simplfies the process for me! looking forward to more great detailed content! 👍👍👏👏

[@alexnail]

Great, glad to help Tim, hope you're keeping well!

[@timnevellphotography]

@@alexnail all good thanks Alex, hope you are too!

[@Ezel21love]

I hope you will get more subscribers to your channel

[@dtgphoto]

Absolutely fascinating video Alex. Absolutely love that shot ! The 4 x A4 looks amazing in its own right too.

[@alexnail]

Thanks Duncan, glad it was helpful. To be honest this ended up being a bit more rambling than I wanted it to be but it’s so hard to keep it short!

[@dtgphoto]

@@alexnail I think you did well to keep it less than an hour or two 🤣

[@alexnail]

@@dtgphoto I've got 3 or 4 hours in me for sure!

[@miganmago]

Great video Alex. One question, the problem that you refer in 7:52min is a problem of lens decentering or lens field curvature?. I have the same issue in my main lens and I want to know more about it and how can i reduce this efect. Thanks in advance.

[@timwecke3744]

Great video thanks man! We need to get you a better rugby top though, perhaps a world champion Springbok top - it'll match all the greens you're working with with the SOUTH AFRICAN landscape. Haha!!! 😂🤣😂

[@alexnail]

@@timwecke3744 ah yes, the springbok fans, who will turn on their team at the drop of a hat unless they are winning. Not sure I would fit in!

[@scottweaverphotovideo]

Alternatively, do you also use high pass sharpening?

[@alexnail]

No, it’s an outdated technique. I might do a video on that and a few other techniques that were created more than 10 years ago but persist today. You are much better using smart sharpen or even unsharp mask!

[@scottweaverphotovideo]

@@alexnail would be very interested in hearing more about your opinions on that. Thanks

[@PhilippLutz]

Thanks for making this very detailed explanation of your printing preparation process! I wish I would have found such a video 10 years ago, when I started to print my first images and never knew how to prepare my images properly and which aspects to look at. Did you also learn everything by yourself or did you have good advice from printing classes, tutorials or even literature?

[@alexnail]

I was BORN knowing how to do this :P But seriously it’s a bit of trial and error, background reading and deciding that some advice handed out definitely wasn’t right for me. For example you don’t need to look at a print that’s been sharpened with a large radius close up for very long to decide it looks pretty bad. But as for the more technical stuff, that’s largely through taking to knowledgable people - Tim and Fotospeed and Tim at OnLandscape

[@Dario_Daniele]

Thanks for the very good deal of information Alex! Got a question about the colour profile you use. Is there a specific reason why you prefer sRGB over Adobe RGB? To my knowledge, the first one is very much indicated for web, whereas the latter is more suitable for printing.

[@alexnail]

That depends on how good you are at printing, what you are printing and how much you care. You really should watch my video on colour management for a more in depth discussion ( kzbin.info/www/bejne/p6nNaJudia2eoM0 ) but in short here are my thoughts: Firstly with this image, there are no colours that I could have printed that weren't possible because of sRGB. The printer + paper gamut is smaller than sRGB. More generally... The human eye adapts to the colour and tonal range of whatever display medium it is looking at. For example most people wouldn't know that the blues in a book are far less colourful than the blue in a print, on a screen, or in a pure blue pigment (which would be the bluest of them all - eg International Klein Blue). Ultramarine in a book is achieved by printing cyan and a bit of magenta. This comes nowhere near to the color intensity of blue ink. I mean really, they are worlds apart, and yet most people don't realise.... The advantage of Adobe RGB is that it is able to display a larger range of colours than sRGB. However these colours are mostly in bright greens and cyans, many of which dont appear much in nature. There is also an advantage in rich reds. So the very best case is that a tiny subset of colours in your image appear richer/more colourful if you work with AdobeRGB, but even if you did get this benefit, you would only be able to tell via direct side by side comparison. Working in AdobeRGB has several problems however. The main one is that most output mediums cannot print in Adobe RGB anyway (or even remotely close to it in the case of CYMK). So if you are trying to print your images these bright colours that look slightly better on your insanely expensive calibrated Adobe RGB monitor, wont look as good on print. This is particularly the case if you print using any sort of pigment based 'giclee' process, where the gamut is smaller than the very best C-Types. Because there is a greater difference between your screen colorspace and your printer gamut you will see a much bigger change at the softproofing stage than you see in this video. Then there is web output....Well as you said sRGB is for web (since most people don't have AdobeRGB monitors) so the edit you've done to make these colours fractionally better cant be appreciated by anyone on the web anyway. So if your prints look basically the same, and your web images are in sRGB, what exactly is the benefit? Why would you go through the challenges of moving between colour spaces, and buying expensive monitors etc, if the difference in prints is so small you could barely see it anyway? I've just worked with so many photographers who didnt really have a good reason for using AdobeRGB or ProPhoto but were having massive problems when converting to sRGB. Many of them were working on screens that weren't Adobe RGB meaning they couldn't even see what they were doing! Lots of people just use these colorspaces because they read they were 'bigger' and that must be better right? For me, accuracy is far more important. Anyway that was way more writing than I planned, but hopefully you get the idea.

[@Dario_Daniele]

@@alexnail Thanks so much for replying Alex, it is just great comparing your thoughts to anybody's else! I will make sure to watch your video on the color management to deepen my knowledge about that topic. Cheers!

[@toddplace1234]

Thanks for an informative video. I learned a lot and will add this to my workflow for printing. I do have one question. What printers would you recommend using in the UK? I live in South Africa and have had a few requests from the UK for prints, but the shipping cost is too much to make it viable.

[@alexnail]

Thanks Nick! I have used ThePrintSpace in the past. They are excellent.

[@toddplace1234]

@@alexnail Thanks Alex. I appreciate it. I will try them out.