Understanding Professional Printing Options

When you select the Print with Preview item on the File menu (as mentioned in the earlier section “This May Be All You Need to Know about Printing”) the huge dialog box shown in Figure 6-1 appears. This dialog contains lots of interesting and cryptic looking options that enable you to make sure that the image prints exactly as you want it to:

Center Image: Use this option to position your image. By default, images are centered. If you don’t want to center the image, uncheck the Center Image option and enter new position values in the top and left alignment boxes at the top of the dialog box.

Tip
To quickly reposition your image, simply drag the image around the preview window.
Scaled Print Size: Use this area to reduce or enlarge the image size for printing. Enter any percentage below 100% to reduce the dimensions of the printed image. Enter any percentage above 100% to enlarge the printed image. You can also enter a value in either the Height or Width boxes. The scale, width, and height settings are linked, meaning that changing any one setting affects the other two.

Remember
When you use this option, the printer still prints all the pixels in the image, but the pixels are just smaller or larger.
Scale to Fit Media: Use this option to fit the image exactly to the printable edges of the paper. A white border will remain around the edges; this is the part of the paper on which your printer can’t print.
Show Bounding Box: Use this option to place a bounding box around your image in the preview pane. This feature is handy if you have a white border around your image and can’t quite tell where the image boundaries are on the preview thumbnail. That way, you can see where the edges of your image are in relation to the paper and resize the image before printing, if necessary.
Print Selected Area: Use this option to print only the selected area of your image (for more information about selecting portions of your image, check out Chapter 7).

Tip
If you just want to take a quick, close-up look at an isolated area of an image, you can use this option to save time.
Show More Options: Put a check in this check box to display Color Management and Output options (a drop-down list box below Show More Options lets you toggle between the two). I discuss most of those options in the sections, “Taking a Look at Color Management Print Options,” and “Printing Color Separations.”

Orientation: Click on the Page Setup button and choose Portrait or Landscape. If you choose Portrait, your image prints on a page that is taller than it is wide; if you choose Landscape, Photoshop prints the image on a page that is wider than it is tall.

Remember

Keep in mind that changes made inside the Print Options and Page Setup dialog box have absolutely no effect on anything except how your image prints. You can’t do any permanent damage to your image in this dialog box, so feel free to experiment with the settings.

Color Management: Every hardware device and software program handles color differently. Try opening an image using several different programs, and you may be surprised to discover that the image looks quite different every time. In fact, try scanning an image and opening the scan in all these different programs. I guarantee that none of the output will match the color of the original image. For more about color management, take a look at Chapter 5.

When printing, Photoshop helps you deal with these different color spaces by adjusting color so it appears the same no matter what kind of device or program (printer, Web browser, output bureau, and so on) is used for the output.

Remember

Color space is just a fancy term for how a device creates color. For instance, a computer monitor uses red, green, and blue light to create color, a color inkjet printer uses black, red, blue, and yellow inks to create color, and digital camera records the colors it sees using the daylight present (which has a yellowish cast) or a flash (which has a bluish cast). How can any of these devices create a color match without some type of color correction? They can’t. That’s what color management and color profile conversion are all about. See Chapter 5 for more about this topic.

To set the color space profile for your printer, select Color Management from the drop-down list box below Show More Options. Then use the Profile drop-down list box in the Print Space area to select the type of output device, for instance Apple RGB, ColorMatch RGB, or your monitor’s specific brand and model number. This information tells Photoshop how to adjust the colors to match printed output to what you see on the screen. This is a one-time setting; Photoshop saves the information that you enter and use this data every time you print something. If you have more than one printer, you can change printers by using the Profile drop-down list box to select it. Photoshop automatically sets the color to match this new printer.