| It's possible to go very deeply into the theory and methodology of printing. Professionals know the power of having color -compensated monitors and color-printing profiles, which guarantee that what you see on the screen is as close as humanly possible to what you will see on the paper. For the rest of us, most of the time pretty good is good enough. We'll delve into some of the mysteries of color printing in this hour , but before we do, let's start with the most basic of the basics. Printers (the hardware kind) use software called printer drivers that function as part of your operating system, whether it's Mac OS or Windows. The driver converts the output from Photoshop (or your word processor, or whatever printable software you're using) into a form that the printer can understand and reproduce on paper. (Okay, on silk or transparency, too.) So, before you can print, you need to have a printer hooked up and the appropriate driver installed. If you have more than one printer available, be sure that you've selected the one you intend to use. If you're on a Mac, use the Printer Setup Utility or choose your printer from the pop-up menu at the top of the Print dialog box. On a PC, select a printer from the File  Page Setup pop-up menu. Photoshop has five print- related commands. Page Setup is part of the printer driver. Print with Preview is specific to Photoshop. (It used to be called Print Options.) Print is where you verify everything you've set in the other two boxes and click OK to create the actual print. Print One Copy does just that. It immediately sends the current image to the printer, no questions asked. It will print to the selected printer with whatever settings were used on the last photo. And Print Online starts up Bridge, which displays a form you can use to order prints online from Adobe (via Ofoto.com). If you just want to print using your own printer, you can make many of the same settings in either the Print with Preview or the Page Setup dialog box. It doesn't really matter which one you use. Let's start with Page Setup. It's shown in Figure 23.1. Figure 23.1. The Page Setup dialog box looks different depending on what printer you're using. 
Each printer's Page Setup dialog box looks a little different, and of course Mac and Windows Page Setup dialogs look different, but they all provide the same basic functions. (Note that not all additional options will be available in every situation.) A Page Setup dialog box will generally display the following information and options: -
Printer The name of the printer always appears somewhere in the dialog box. Make sure you've selected the right one for the job. -
Properties On Windows systems, you can click this button to access a dialog box that enables you to change options such as paper size , layout, printer resolution, and halftone settings. -
Paper Size Choose the size of the paper on which you're printing. You'll generally find a good selection of standard U.S. and European paper sizes, including letter, legal, A4, tabloid, and envelope sizes. -
Source If your printer has multiple paper trays or gives you a choice of tray or single-sheet feed, you can choose the paper source for the printer to use. -
Orientation Choose how you want the printed image to be placed on the page: portrait (the page's height is the larger dimension) or landscape (the page's width is the larger dimension). -
Scale Want the image to print smaller or larger? Adjust this percentage appropriately. Too Big?  | Later, when you actually click 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 on which you're printing, Photoshop tells you. You can then choose to print anyway, resulting in only part of the image being printed, or you can cancel and adjust the Reduce or Enlarge value so that the whole image fits on the page. |
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You can set other options in this dialog box, too, but I prefer to set them in the Print with Preview dialog box so that I can see exactly what I'm doing. Take a look at the Print with Preview dialog box in Figure 23.2. Figure 23.2. Notice that I've clicked the More Options button. 
The first option here is Position. If you uncheck Center Image, which is checked by default, you can then move the picture around on the page by varying the Top and Left position values, placing it wherever you want. This is a big change from early versions of Photoshop, which could only print an image centered. If you drag on a corner of the image, you can rescale it. The Scaled Print size values will change accordingly . You can also scale the image by typing a number into the Scale percentage window. Scaling is done relative to the original image size. If you have a photo that's 6 inches wide and you want it to print 9 inches wide, scale it to 150%. This setting can be made here or in the Page Setup box. When you click Show More Options, you can choose between Output options and Color Management options. Output options are the same here as in the Page Setup box, except that you can see them on the preview screen as you apply them. In Figure 23.3, I've added crop marks, calibration marks, and a caption to my photo. Figure 23.3. Now we're ready to print with the desired features. 
Here are some of the options and what they mean: -
Background Want to print a background color around your image? Click the Background button and you'll be greeted by the standard Color Picker. Whichever color you pick is used only for printing and does not alter your actual image file. (If you're printing from Windows, be sure to turn this off after you use it. Otherwise, you'll print the background around the next picture as well.) Be careful about using this feature with an inkjet printer. It eats up a lot of ink! -
Border Similarly, if you would like a border around your printed image, click the Border button. In the resulting dialog box, you can set the width of the printed border in inches, millimeters, or points. The border is always black; you can't change the color. (Like Background, using this feature doesn't affect the actual image file.) -
Bleed Bleeding means that part of the image runs right off the edge of the paper. There isn't any border or empty space between the image and the edge of the page. (Note that this feature won't work on every printer. Some printers are incapable of printing to the very edge of a page.) Click the Bleed button to define the bleed area of an image in inches, millimeters, or points. Higher values move the crop marks within the boundaries of the image so that less of the image gets printed. You can't bleed an image more than an eighth of an inch. -
Screen Use Printer's Default Screens is checked by default, and you won't be able to change anything else. Uncheck this option if you want to customize the other halftone options. Most of the time, Photoshop's default settings work fine. -
Transfer This allows you to compensate for dot gain between the image and film, when using an imagesetter. Dot gain is the increase in size that happens as ink spreads out on the paper. A 50% dot, for example, could print as a 58% dot, producing an 8% dot gain. The Transfer function makes 50% dots in the image print as 50% dots on film. Similar to dot gain curves, the transfer functions let you specify up to 13 values along the grayscale to create a customized transfer function. Unlike dot gain curves, transfer functions apply only to printingthey don't affect the image color data. If you're using a home/office inkjet printer, you needn't worry about dot gain. -
Interpolation Interpolation refers to some printers' capability to resample an image as they print it. That is, any PostScript Level 2 printer can take a low-resolution image and resample it on-the-fly , improving the resolution so that the printout is of better quality. This is valuable only if you're dealing with low-resolution images. Interpolation is available only on PostScript printers. -
Calibration Bars Check this box to print calibration and color bars next to your image. A calibration bar is a row of 11 gray squares of different values, and a color bar is a row of 11 colors. These bars can help when you're trying to calibrate to a specific printer or to see how a specific printer prints. (This option is available only if you're using a PostScript printer.) -
Registration Marks Activate this feature to print a variety of registration marks around the image. You can add bull's eyes (which look like what you would expect), star targets (two crossed lines within a circle), and/or precise pinpoint marks (two simple crossed lines). These marks can be helpful for aligning color separations. -
Corner Crop Marks Corner crop marks appear around each corner of your image, defining where it should be trimmed . They're simply horizontal and vertical lines. -
Center Crop Marks These crop marks are centered along each side of the image, defining the exact center of the image. They look like two crossed lines. Figure 23.4 shows the registration marks and crop marks added to the image. Figure 23.4. A printout showing various crop marks, registration marks, and a caption. 
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Description Check this box, and on the printed page you'll see the text that appears in the Description field of the File Info dialog box for that file. (To get to this dialog box, choose File File Info and make sure that Description is selected in the top pop-up menu.) This can be helpful for providing contact info or details next to your image. -
Labels This check box prints the filename next to the image. If you're printing color separations, the name of the appropriate color channel is also printed on each color plate. -
Emulsion Down This setting prints your image as a horizontal mirror image of the original. Everything gets flipped left-to-right . Use this setting when you're printing on T-shirt transfer paper so that the image faces the right way when it's transferred to the shirt. Or, if you're taking the file to a print shop, the staff there can tell you whether you need to print this way for some other reason. -
Negative With this option checked, the printer reverses the values of the image. That is, the whites become black, the blacks become white, and everything in between changes accordingly. You end up with a negative image. This option is useful if you're printing to film for commercial offset printing because these images usually need to be negatives . Figure 23.3 shows the additional options I've selected in the Print with Preview dialog box. Figure 23.4 shows the resulting output. Before you continue, make sure that whatever you want to print is currently visible on the screen. 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. The Color Management options are fewer and simpler: -
Print Choose Document for normal printing; choose Proof if you want to try to match the way your image would look when printed on an output device other than your own (such as a four-color printing press). Either way, Photoshop uses the device profiles specified in the Color Settings dialog box. -
Options In the Color Handling pop-up menu, choose whether you want the color managed by Photoshop, by your printer, or not at all. If you choose Photoshop, specify a device profile that matches your printer. Leave the Rendering Intent pop-up menu set on Perceptual for the closest visual match in colors. |
