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Hi, I am Rich Harrington and welcome to this edition of the Photoshop CS4 sneak peak. Today, we are going to be talking about something you are going to want to know about and that is printing. So you are going to get your photos just right, great images, you want to print them and share them.
Fortunately Photoshop CS4 has a lot of great improvements that really streamline the printer interface, give you greater control and supports higher quality output. Let us take a look. So if you have an image open you can go ahead and choose file print. You will notice that the whole print with preview option is no longer there because the default is to give you a preview when printing. So we will go ahead and choose that and it brings up the new printing dialogue box.
Now one of the things I like here is that it actually gives you a preview of how the image is going to fit on the page. Here I have a panoramic image which is quite large so it is not going to fit on the page that we have for the image. Now we can go to page setup and it is going to bring up the standard page setup dialogue box. And my printer supports different sizes so I can choose for example maybe I am going to tabloid paper, which is an 11x17 and I will specify a landscape orientation.
Notice how the preview updates automatically which is great. Now we are seeing that not all of the colors are coming through exactly right that is because I am printing an RGB image here but that works well. We could choose to see warnings for things as we are working. If we were actually printing to a printer that was going to use CMYK, we could even choose that gamma warning which would indicate out of range colors. Now a lot of ink jets will take RGB images just fine but this will warn you if you are going to a CMYK printer if you have those out of gamma colors that you need to correct.
Notice that the whole image is not fitting onto the paper. So we can go ahead and check the box here that says scale to fit media. And it automatically adjusts the size of the image to fit onto the page. Now, a lot of times, you are going to adjust the paper size to fit the photo but this is a quick way to quickly get the image sized so it will fit on the particular printer you are using. This is really easy because when you choose this, Photoshop does all the math for you and shrinks the image down so that it will fit on the page.
The good news is it is just shrinking it down for the print, the original image remains untouched so you are not discarding any resolution that you have captured. Now we have a few other options here, we can see measurements in inches or centimeters, points or picas. Depending on upon your country, you are probably going to choose inches or centimeters. We also have some other options here as we are working.
One of the things I recommend is allowing your printing to manage colors if you are using an ink jet printer. You could actually assign a rendering intent or a printer profile as needed, I am going to stick with perceptual on this case and if you are doing CMYK output, you have a lot of additional options down here that will allow you to specify how to handle the color profiles. Under output, we can also can turn other things on to make it a little bit easier. We have the ability to add registration marks if we were going to be doing film output, crop marks to help us cut the image. Center crop marks if you need those and this really comes in handy if you are going to be using a ruler to cut the image out. You are going to use an X-acto knife and you want to mount the image, these cut marks will make it a little bit easier so you know where to trim the image.
We also have other things in here such as labels or descriptions that we can turn on and of course you can actually do a negative output if you are going to film. Now an important one here if your printer supports it, is send 16 bit data. I am using a slightly older printer here which does not support 16 bit but if you are on a Mac and you have a newer printer, many of those printers do support 16 bit data. And this is absolutely fantastic. It is going to give you much more information to work with when you generate the print. So be sure you have a 16 bit image and a printer that supports the 16 bit data and if any of you lovely printer manufacturers out there would like to send me one of those printers, I would be more than happy to show people how to use it.
But it is a great option, I am going to be upgrading my own printer soon and this really will give you much greater color fidelity. Now a few more things you can deal within here as you are working. Notice you can change the orientation of the page if you need to. You can also match print colors or gamma warning, do what you need to, to get the printer right. If you have multiple printers you can specify which printer you want to target and that really gives you some great options. If you want to store those options, you could just click done and it would not print but it will store those options for the next time.
And here we are opening up a 16 bit image and let us just get it exactly right how we want in raw here. Here we go tweak exposure just a little bit and open, let us go ahead and choose print. Notice same sort of options. I am going to flip this to a landscape orientation, switch back, we will use letter scale it to fit the media, that is all set there. Mark any output things that we need and again this is a 16 bit image but you will need a 16 bit printer to support it.
Now this 16 bit printing is currently a Mac only feature and that is pretty rare for Adobe. As soon as the Windows Operating System supports 16 bit printing, Adobe has stated that they will role out that functionality in Photoshop. So if you are working with a newer printer and you are on a Mac, be sure to take advantage of that 16 bit printing. Increase processing time by the printer but much better results. When you are all set, you want to print simply click print and it will go ahead and send your image. Notice the default printing box comes up, if you need to, you can adjust things like paper handling, you can adjust the schedule so it knows when to print the job if you would like to submit it but have it hold for a while. And even take advantage of things like additional color management options if needed.
When you are set, you would click print to then send it to your printer and you would be in great shape. Now if you have already set everything up and you want to make an additional print, you can take advantage of a new command and that is file print one copy. When you choose this, it is going to use the last settings that you loaded for that image and print it again. So if you have done printing for a particular image and you have gone through and set up everything how you need it, you can just reprint that image with the exact same settings. Remember, simply choose file, print one copy. That is it for this episode of Photoshop CS4 sneak peak, I am your host Rich Harrington. We have got a lot of cool things that you can check out over at our website at CSfour.com.
We have a great contest going with prizes that you could win as well as all of the other episodes in the training series so be sure to check that out. If you would like to learn more about Photoshop on a regular basis, we have some ongoing pod cast series you might be interested in. The first is called understanding Adobe Photoshop. You can find out about it at Rastervector.com. It is for general interest Photoshop enthusiasts, digital photographers, graphic designers, web folks as far as those of you working in video and motion graphics, you are going to want to check out our other series Photoshop for videos and its blog at Photoshopforvideo.com.
So I hope you enjoyed it. This is Rich Harrington and tune in to our other episodes, thanks.
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