i don't do a lot of printing (actually haven't printed in quite a while) but am way overdue to get some wildlife, landscape and family shots printed at one of the good online printing labs. i was wondering if there are any good tips on workflow to get the best printing results starting with raw images that have been processed in lr3? it is a pretty basic question but i haven't found any consistent ways of going from an image edited in lr3 to a saved file that the labs like....so thanks in advance for any tips/suggestions.
Just export your RAW files out of LR and select the JEG option, compressed to level 10 in sRGB color space, which is what most labs want.
I use White House Custom Color for all my outside printing. Set up an account and download their free software. Place your order and you'll have prints at your door in 3 days (free shipping too).
JPGs can be given any colour space but can only be 8 bits per colour channel. Some printers can handle more than sRGB and more than 8 bits per channel.
Exporting applies its own sharpening. You may want to minimize that sharpening and apply your own but perhaps it does not matter much if you have already correctly sharpened the master image file in Lr with the necessary capture sharpening. I don't know the ins and outs of how Lr works out what sharpening to apply to exported files for printing or display.
Colour space is important, as is the colour space info being put in the file. I don't know how Lr handles that. If the range of colour channel values in a jpg file is 0 to 255 and there is no info about what those numbers actually represent then you can easily get the wrong results in the prints. A printer may assume sRGB but if Lr was using ProPhoto or Adobe RGB then it will not look like sRGB should.
Whatever colour space is used you can assume that the printing mob will adapt your image file to suit their own printer profile and give you what you thought you would get. Alternatively, you can find out what printer profile they use and do your own print previews using that profile so that you can edit colours accordingly - but don't bother unless you expect that their printer cannot handle the colour range within your image, and that your image needs to be tweaked.
cohenfive wrote:
so if you are doing large prints as i will likely do, lots and lots of pixels....
Probably true, but I would expect the lab could enlarge or shrink the file as required. The downside of letting them do that is that you then lose control of the image sharpening which should ideally be done for specific image sizes and viewing distances. It won't matter much if the viewing distance increases in proportion to the print size.
The viewing distance also affects the required pixels per inch. You will not need 300ppi for an image viewed from six feet away because the viewer cannot resolve 300 ppi at that distance. A good lab will want to know what viewing distance you intend.
