I love taking pictures and creating graphics. I can spend hours editing photos and crafting kaleidoscopes and other interesting things in Photoshop. I have super quality, top of the line (when I purchased it) Canon i9900 wideformat photo printer that I couldn’t have been more excited to bring home and play with. But after several attempts, it wasn’t long until I rarely printed any of my images.

Printing has always been a frustrating process. Pictures have always turned out too dark, too low-contrast or with horrible color casts. Getting a good print always meant a lot of test copies or strips while I tweaked levels or curves and held my breath as the print came out. It never looked like it did on my screen. I wasted way too much ink, paper and time trying everything from installing new printer drivers, screen calibration techniques, and untold combinations of printer settings and profiles. And I was always disappointed. Until yesterday.

I think I have finally figured out a way to make my prints come out reasonably close to what I see on my monitor and it’s a method that seems to work consistantly across different types of pictures with different color combinations. I wanted to share what I found since I’m sure I am not the only Canon I-Series printer owner who’s had the same types of frustrations and Canon doesn’t seem to offer much documentation or help on how to optimize your prints. Having said that, you still may have to do some tweaking (using my exact numbers may just get you in the ballpark) but the core of the “secret” should be easy to apply to your own prints.

Prepping your image for print

1. Calibrate your monitor. This is very important. There are many methods to do this. Photoshop comes with Adobe Gamma as one alternative, for instance. If you have access to one, I highly suggest using the Spyder 2, which is what I was able to do. If you can’t calibrate your monitor, there’s no point in continuing the steps. You’ve got to have a decent representation of colors on your screen.
2. Open your image in Photoshop. Go to Edit->Assign Profile. If it’s not already selected as your Working RGB, choose sRGB ICE61966-2.1.
   
   This step has many schools of thought, but again, this is what worked for me.
3. Do whatever adjustments to the image to make it look how you would like it to look once printed such as color adjustments, levels, curves, cropping, etc.
4. Click on the top layer in your layers list and create a new Levels adjustment layer on top of it: Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Levels
5. With RGB selected in the Channel list, enter 1.35 in the middle box for Input Levels
   
6. Here’s the secret! For each of the Channels (Red, Green, Blue but not RGB), if the histogram (black wave looking thing) doesn’t reach all the way to the right, slide the little white triangle towards the left until it meets the border of the histogram. See the next two images for details (my example picture only needed Green and Blue adjusted).
   
   
   Update: After testing some more images where the histogram didn’t span all the way to the left (unlike my first tests), I have found that you should also move the black triangle on the left if it doesn’t border the histogram edges.
7. This step may vary depending on the picture. I have found that adjusting the midtone Input Levels in the Green channel down (within the range from 0.90 to 0.75) and the Blue channel up (up to about 1.10) seems to correct some color casts. This seems to depend on which colors I want to tone down in the print and is the main thing you’ll have to tweak if it doesn’t come out right the first time.
   Update: I seem to have found a pattern here… if you don’t have to move the the triangles in the histogram, leave the value at 1.00, otherwise use the values specified above fpr the appropriate channel. The midtone value for Red can also be changed, in the same value range as Green.
8. In the Options section on your Print->Print with Preview screen, make sure when you print that the Printer Profile chosen the same one that you chose for the image at the first step: sRGB ICE61966-2.1. Having the two profiles match seems to make a difference. Also, it is important that Let Photoshop Determine Colors is set for Color Handling.
   
9. On the Canon printer properties dialog, make sure that Color Adjustment is Manual so that the printer will trust Photoshop to make the color choices.
   
10. Print it out!

Your image will probably look pretty washed out on your screen. This is to be expected.

Screen without adjustment level	Screen with adjustment level

When you print and compare it to your monitor, make sure that you turn off (click the eye) the printing adjustment layer. Your print should look like the “original” without that layer. If it’s close but not quite, tweak the numbers for midtone Input Levels on the Blue and Green channels. After a few times you should get a feel for what those numbers need to be.

This is not a perfect method, but so far it has taken about 90% of the guesswork and frustration out of printing for me. Again, I don’t know that it will work for other people, so please let me know if it does or doesn’t! And please, print out some SMALL tests before you waste a lot of paper and ink! Good luck!

I was having a conversation with a friend last night about Photoshop and how there are about 900 ways to do the same thing or variations on the same thing. Photoshop is such a versatile tool that I don’t think you can ever run out new options to discover.

My friend was looking for a method to make colors pop in pictures so here’s what I came up with. I have been experimenting with inverting layers and playing with blending a good bit lately to see what interesting things might result. There are already many tutorials on how to make colors pop out there, but maybe you’ll find this one has a slightly different effect. I’ve noticed it tends to emphasize Yellows a bit more than some approaches I’ve tried before.

Before	After

You can download the action that I created for this, but if you’re curious about what it’s doing or you just like to do things the hard way, here are the steps:

1. Open a copy of the photo that needs some enhancement
   
2. Duplicate the background layer (Layer->Duplicate Layer) and name it Inverted
3. Select Inverted and choose Image->Adjustments->Invert
   
4. Change the Blending Mode on Inverted to Luminosity
   
   
5. Duplicate the background layer again and name it Merged 1
6. Select Inverted and choose Layer->Merge Down
7. Change the Blending Mode on Merged 1 to Linear Dodge
   
8. Duplicate the background layer again and name it Merged 2
9. Select Merged 1 and merge down
10. Change the Blending Mode on Merged 2 to Multiply
    
11. Duplicate the background layer again and name it Color Pop
12. Select Merged 2 and merge down

There you go! Your colors should be pretty saturated. At this point it’s a matter of playing with the Color Pop layer. You can tone it down by adjusting the Opacity, and you can also get some interesting effects by changing the Blending Mode:

• For pictures that started out “pastel” (not saturated and possibly over exposed), Multiply gave good results.
  
• For pictures that started out fairly well contrasted, Overlay and Soft Light had nice boosts.
  
• If seems that there’s too much yellow in your Color Pop layer, try Saturation
  
• For hyper saturation on an almost cartoony level, try Vivid Light.
  

While playing with this, I also found an interesting way to subdue the colors in an image for a nice washed out effect that doesn’t reduce the depth of your shadows. See the Subdued Color tutorial if you’re interested!

While playing around with inversions and trying to figure out how to make colors pop, I stumbled across a nice way to achieve the opposite effect: making colors subdued and washed out. The nice thing about this effect is that it doesn’t also wash out your shadows, only the color is affected (unless you use some special blend modes).

Before	After	Second Pass

Here is the action I created if you’d like to download it and save some effort. Otherwise, here are the steps to do it yourself:

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I really enjoy making and playing with patterns. I don’t know why I like it so much… I usually don’t have any good practical use for what I come up. Most of my results are fairly busy and not suited for the web design and photo retouching projects that I do for “production” most often. But I can spend hours playing with patterns anyway. I should have been a gift wrap or fabric designer instead!

A lot of the patterns I come up with end up being grayscale which at first doesn’t seem to be very interesting. But actually there’s a lot of potential in greyscale patterns. They don’t limit you by having pre-existing colors that you may or may not like, or force you to try to change one color that you don’t like to make it fit into your project’s color scheme. They’re blank color canvases, just waiting for you.

This tutorial will be about the Gradient Map method of colorizing two different types of grayscale patterns. This method can give you complete control over the way the colors are rendered, or allow you to use blending modes with preset options to come up with some interesting and sometimes surprising coloration. Gradient Map shading works by taking all the colors in an image in order of value and replacing any pixel in an image by its “match” in a gradient you choose. It is an interesting effect but depending on what gradient you choose to apply can often come out with garish results. You’ll learn how to take even the most gaudy gradients and turn them into something more sophisticated.

Grayscale patterns can be grouped into two categories, each of which has slightly different applications for Gradient Maps:

Limited Shade Patterns

2 shade (B&W)

3 shade (black, white & gray)

These are halftone patterns I made for another tutorial you can download.

Many shade grayscale patterns

Unlimited amount of shades

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I just figured out an accurate way to correct color casts in your photos in 4 easy steps with Photoshop without having to use Curves or advanced color management.

Here’s a picture of some penguins with a yellow/greenish cast:

And here they are after the technique, in their black and bright white glory:

How to do it:

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We went to a Beck concert back in October and it was pretty awesome. One of the things that made it so interesting was the dynamic videos on the giant screens behind Beck and his crew. There was a guy who was bascially a VJ for the displays with some sort of scratch turntable-like hardware that he used to control the images and how they overlapped/changed/merged with each other. One of the effects I liked the most had multiple scales of a halftone pattern that merged together and made some pretty complex designs.

So inspired by that, I decided to play with halftone patterns today in Photoshop.

I started off with a basic halftone filter then duplicated and scaled by half. I played with different offsets between the patterns and several different blending options and opacity. I think there are probably thousands of other patterns that you could come up with but I ended up with about 37 interesting ones in a couple of hours of playing with it. Some of them are just two colors and made with two sizes of halftone (100% and 50%), others are 3 colors or made with 3 sizes (100%, 50% and 25%).

To create your own variations here’s basically what I did:
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While perusing the Technique group on Flickr the other day I found a post about creating “Amazing Circles”. The name sounded so cheesy I couldn’t resist checking it out. And now it’s my latest addiction. I spent the better part of a weekend going through my old pictures looking for good candidates to try out this technique on and in the process learned a few things about how to make a good Amazing Circle.

I learned how to do it from a tutorial that one of my fellow Flickrers wrote up, but I made a few changes to the process to suit my needs. This is a description of how I make mine.

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