Tutorial 1

James Paterson can help you prepare for printing with top tips on enhancing colours, sharpening and resizing your photos in Elements

Prepare your pics for printing by enhancing colours and sharpening

Too few of our digital photos ever make it into physical form. Which is a real shame, because there’s something wonderful about holding a print of a photo you’ve made yourself, perhaps framing it or giving it as a gift. Maybe part of the reason is the process involved in making a print. In the days when a roll of film would be developed and all 24 or 36 images printed, we would have a surplus of prints. But these days, the print isn’t the default. Instead, we first need to decide what to print, then prepare the image for printing and either send it off, take it to a high street printer or print the shot out ourselves.

If we want to make the most of our prints, we also need to learn a few key skills about things such as sharpening, print resolution and enhancing colours for printing. Here’s where this tutorial comes in. We’ll explain how to prepare your images for printing in Photoshop Elements. We want our prints to have punch, so first we’ll explore a couple of tricks for enhancing colours and boosting tones. Then we’ll explain how to resize an image for a specific print size. Once done, the final stage is to sharpen the photo.

The sharpening stage is key for crisp, detailed prints. Sometimes called ‘output sharpening’, it’s crucial that this stage in the image-editing workflow should occur at the very end, after the image has been resized for a specific output – whether that be a print or on-screen. This way, we can tailor the sharpening to the specific viewing size and resolution of the output. Or, to put it another way, we can make sure those details pop!