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Posted to uk.d-i-y
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Inkjet print a good indicator of adequate levels for a Bootsphotoprint?
On 20/12/2019 00:56, wrote:
On Thursday, 19 December 2019 21:11:30 UTC, Martin Brown wrote:
On 19/12/2019 12:03, Mike Halmarack wrote:
On Thu, 19 Dec 2019 02:48:19 -0800 (PST), tabbypurr wrote:
On Wednesday, 18 December 2019 14:28:38 UTC, Mike Halmarack
wrote:
My daughter sends me photos from her camera and I try to
optimise them for photoprinting. I often find that the final
photos end up too dark, even when I tweak my computer monitor
brightness. I know I can buy additional equipment to help
with this, though I'm not keen to. Would printing the files
on an inkjet printer provide adequate examples of how the
photoprint will ultimately come out?
If there's one adjustment I use more than any other, it's to
move the brightness levels of the file up so the white areas
come out white. In Gimp it's Colour, Levels.
NT
Thanks, I'll have a look at that.
Any easy sanity check is to take a look at the luminance histogram.
That will show any obvious faults in the raw image like under/over
exposure.
Most print shops will automatically scale maximum brightness in
the supplied image to 255 if you feed them something underexposed.
But that isn't usually what you want. For general photos you want at
least some of the bright area to overexpose & white out. How much is
matter of judgement, but for general photos if you only have the
brightest spot at white the rest is too dark. Brightest pixel at
white is a good approach for diagrams, text etc, and some very
carefully staged photos, but not for most real life photos.
It is a lot better than having the brightest pixel at mid grey.
They do come in two sorts one scales to cover map darkest onto black to
lightest onto white and the other does something more like a classical
enlarger of exposing to get an average mid grey density of some sort.
It is very much horses for courses. If you are getting them to print
astrophotographs where most of the sky really is *black* you have to
override the automatic adjustments and tell the machine to print it
exactly as is. That said the brightest stars usually are 255 but some of
the automatic enhance printable image defaults can be destructive.
--
Regards,
Martin Brown
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