If you follow what you read in books or discussion groups you may think the way to get the best prints is to simply calibrate your monitor, select the best paper and obtain a good profile for it, choose the best printer you can afford and click Print. Or maybe you first soft-proof, make the appropriate corrections then click Print. Well I’m here to tell you it doesn’t quite work this way. (more…)

Macquarie Editions strives for the highest quality prints from your files. The way you capture images, process/edit them and prepare the files you provide for printing however largely determines the output quality you’ll get. The following are general guidelines for the last step: (more…)

Most books on Photoshop will tell you that Curves is the way to edit the tonality (and colour) of your images. What they don’t mention is that an edit with the composite RGB curve (the “RGB” channel) performs as you’d expect only for neutral colours (R=G=B). The further you move away from this neutral axis, the greater the distortions are. These distortions manifest themselves as unwanted changes to saturation and even hue. (more…)

I’m often asked “what’s the best colour space to use for submission of files for printing?”. The following is an attempt to answer this.

The short answer is that it doesn’t matter. Colour Management will automatically translate from whatever space your image is currently in to the appropriate printer/paper space. All you have to do is make sure each and every file you provide has been tagged with its colour profile (the working space you used to edit the file). The Embed option for this is at the bottom of Photoshop’s File Save As dialog. Files provided without reference as to what the RGB values mean are useless. (more…)