PREP YOUR PICS FOR PRINTING

Editing tips on creating a print with more punch

Printing photos can often lead to disappointing

results. The vibrant colours and rich contrast of a photo viewed on your iPhone or Mac’s display can often look dull and flat when the image is printed out physically. This

is due to a variety of factors. For starters, your Mac or iPhone’s screen displays millions of colours by mixing reds, greens and blues. In general, printers create colour by mixing cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black) inks (CMYK), which

results in thousands rather than millions of colours (though some printers use extra inks for more faithful results – see page 65). As a result a printer’s dots of colour may not match the rich colour palette of the original digital photo’s pixels.

Sometimes colours such as blue in a digital photo will print with a slightly different hue, as the printer is incapable of printing the

photo’s full range of colours. Unprintable colours are called ‘out of gamut’ colours. In high-end apps, such as Photoshop CC you can turn on a gamut warning (View > Gamut Warning). This reveals unprintable colours with a grey overlay. You can then apply a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and tweak the hue or saturation until the patches of grey disappear.

Photoshop users can also choose a CMYK colour space to work in, which displays a more printable range of colours (rather than using the default RGB colour space used to create images for sharing via web or social media).

Print ready

The rich contrast in a digital image may look a little flat in print. This is because your on-screen digital image has a higher dynamic range of tones than its printed version (especially when viewed on an iPhone 13’s super-bright OLED HDR display). Despite the differences between how an image is displayed on a screen or in print, the good news is there are things you can do to get a better print, even if you’re using Apple’s Photos app.

On the page opposite, we share some ways to help bring out more colour, texture and detail so your photos look their best after being printed by a third-party company, such as Photo Box or Saal Digital.

We’ll also give you tips on getting the best results from your own desktop printer, and you can also follow our walkthrough for the iOS version of Photos, and send images wirelessly to printers such as the Kodak Mini 2 Retro (see right).

With a little editing (and by using high-quality photo paper in your printer) your physical print should look almost as good as the digital version.

To help you identify and adjust unprintable colours Photoshop CC has a handy gamut (out of range) warning.