PhotoLab 4 with X-rite i1Display Studio display calibrator

I think using the term “export” along with my name is outrageous!!! :slight_smile:
…but thanks for the smile!

If I can learn 1/50th of what Joanna knows, I will be thrilled!

we are not on twitter here

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What effect happens depending on the setting for resolution? I assume this has something to do with printers, not screens? I was under the assumption that the device that is receiving the information already has its own pre-set resolution. Is that incorrect?

Since the image size is already set by the number of pixels, what is the purpose in selecting a number for “resolution”? If the image is to be resized (that box is checked) I see the image size, in pixels, has already been set.

(I’ve never paid any attention to the “resolution” setting - instead, I have been setting the number of pixels I wanted for the (longest) image size.

Hello,

to relieve my princess of printing and image processing :laughing: I will share a link, hoping it finds your benevolence.
Print Resolution: What Is It And Why Is It So Important? - Chilliprinting
!!! Information in the link seems not to be correct…see statement of Joanna !!!
Your most devoted servant :man_kneeling:

Greetings

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THANK YOU! While I knew what some number of dots per inch mean as in a low number for newspapers, and a high number as in magazines, I just started to read the article you linked to, and it is starting to allow some of this stuff to make sense to me. While I don’t print, images I take for the hospital I do volunteer work for DO print them. The more I understand, the better.

Back to reading - I just wanted to say a quick thank you.

I know it seems useless setting the resolution on this particular dialog, it’s just a habit I have got into.

I’ve just always used 72ppi for screen display, even though my present Apple Display is around 110ppi.

The only time resolution is critical is when sending a file to a printer, where it determines the physical print area. It is a common misapprehension that this should be 300ppi, but this comes from people thinking that it needs to match the printer resolution, whereas, for viewing at the average distance, you only really need 240ppi.

And thereby hangs another misconception…

On this dialog DxO has, erroneously, used dpi as the unit when this should only ever apply to the resolution of the dots on paper from the printer, not the number of pixels, each one of which may be printed with several ink dots.

My Epson SC-P600 can print up to 5760dpi which, if each dot equalled one pixel, would give a print size of less than an inch for an image from my Nikon D810. As it is, 7360 pixels for the long edge of one of my files gives me a length of 30.67 inches.

When I am printing for our photo club’s exhibition, the frames are all 50cm x 40 cm, so I have a spreadsheet that calculates what finished image size I need at 240ppi to fit inside a matboard that gives a margin of 6cm at the narrowest (it’s all about proportion and aesthetic). Then I just take the number of pixels for the longest side and either export the image as TIFF, for printing through ColorSync, or I print direct from PhotoLab using the physical dimensions from the spreadsheet.

Interesting article if it didn’t insist on erroneously propagating the myths I have just discussed, in mixing up the concepts of dpi and ppi :wink: :nerd_face: :slightly_smiling_face:

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Just a short additional thought. I read the article carefully. It was smooth sailing until I got to " Choosing your Resolution". From then on, it was mostly new to me - it made sense, but I never thought about it this way before, probably because it has to do with printing. I will read it again later, and so some math at the same time. I have a feeling that some of my older, lower resolution, cameras will have a specific size as to how large the images can be printed at 300dpi. My old “limit” was 16" by 20". I had no idea how to do this for printed images, but I sent off six images I took to a professional printer, and they made huge posters several feet in size, that looked good, and detailed. I was amazed. I’ll ask about this later - I have no idea what tricks they used, and they charged a lot of money, but somehow they made my very old images (from an Olympus e10 camera) look as if I took them with a large format camera.

I don’t print my images, but the hospital I do volunteer work for in India makes posters all the time, which get viewed close-up despite their size. I would like to understand this better.

Just a quick, insistent, word here. The article is plain wrong. See my reply and if you need more clarification, ask questions :blush:

Hi @Joanna ,
do you think it’s better to delete my answer with the link, not to confuse other people.

best regards

I obviously have been totally ignorant about this. When I took things (in India) to be printed, I gave them the original image from my camera, and told them the size print I needed. I never, ever, modified the image for printing. From what you posted, maybe I need to do more, in order to get the best result?

My question (eventually) will be if I have an image of some given resolution, and I need a large print, are there things that I should do before sending the image to the print shop? Aravind has taken images from my Fuji X100 camera, and printed them the size of a huge display window. Standing back several feet, to see the whole image, it looks fine. Walking up close to it though, it looks horrible. All I (we) did was give the printer the image from the camera. When (if) this happens again, what else should I do?

Hello Mike,

have a look at this thread: Resolution (Dpi) in print module

Sigi

In order to know how big an image can be printed to without using interpolation, you simply take the size in pixels and divide by the resolution in ppi to give you the physical size in inches. If that size is not big enough, then you can use interpolation software to carefully increase the density of pixels without making them look like big squares. I started off by using something called Genuine Fractals, but that is no longer available as a standalone and is part of ON1 Photo RAW and it does an excellent job.

It’s all down to viewing distance. I use interpolation software if I am printing to something like 40" x 32" to hang in a gallery where people are likely to approach the prints closely. If they are not going to be able to approach the print so closely, it’s not so important.

I was in Dublin Airport and had to pass a gigantic wall poster that they had created, without any regard to minimum viewing distance. From the foot or so away from it that I was, all I could see was 4" square pixels; I had to walk back a good 20 feet before I could see anything like an image.

It all depends on how large your original image is, how large they want to print it and how near people are likely to view it from. Oh, and how fussy the client is about clarity. If they’ve been happy in the past, why worry with anything other than the original image? Otherwise, you would need to use something like ON1 to increase the image size reliably.

The higher the camera pixel count, the better results you will get at larger sizes. As a guide, you can usually get away with interpolating to twice the “native” print size (with my D810 at 36Mpx, that would be 60" instead of 30")

If they want really large prints, you’d better break out the Graflex :crazy_face: :laughing: :hugs:

Thanks. I knew I had been over this before somewhere :blush:

The people I work with most of the time are very fussy. The majority of people there are not fussy at all. I used to have a program that would enlarge the image, but I can’t remember which one I used. We bought it, so I ought to eventually figure out which one we got.

My first real digital camera way back when, the Olympus e10 with 4 megapixels, was capable of creating images suitable for enlarging as huge overhead banners that looked great at trade shows. These were done at at a high-tech printing lab in Miami, quite expensive. The camera had a very good lens.

There has to be more to this than just the image size in megapixels. Mathematically, everything you are telling me is quite logical. I’ve always suspected they had special software to enlarge the photos, while still keeping them looking sharp. Straight lines remained straight, not jagged. Maybe it was an illusion, but it was very effective. This was a long time ago - you can look up the e10 if you wish. I never should have sold it, but I assumed my Nikons could do at least as good, if not better - but back then, the Nikons weren’t all that great, looking back at them.

If it’s safe to do so, I hope to go back to India in October. Until then, the only printing I will be doing is my own, on a simple Canon b&w laser printer.

Hi @Joanna,

Thank you for pointing out this use of ColorSync utility.
This will do the job until PL offer an integrated soft proofing tool :blush:
Do I understand correctly that the profile you “match to” is the printer’s profile ?
(Fotospeed PF… = is the destination’s profile (printer))

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A few weeks ago I was also looking for my path and I stumbled on this FAQ that helped me on my iMac. Of course now I made my own settings but the “checklist” is good to go.
If this can help someone in the futur:

I’ve been puzzled about what to do - this seems like an excellent description on how to do this sort of work on an iMac with built-in display.

Over the past week, my nephew, who recently purchased a Mac Mini, got upset that had he waited, he could have bought one with the new Apple chip instead of Intel. It’s my understanding that PL4 doesn’t yet run on the Apple cpu, but I found a way to improve things for him, and for me. I’m struggling with too little memory (8gb), which has led to computer shutdowns. His Mac Mini has 32 GB ram. So I’m buying it from him, and he will buy the new version with Apple chip, and I’ll hook the Mini up directly to my ASUS display. My friend at Apple Tech Support told me that there is a new graphics chip that drops into the Mini and it’s “not expensive”. Bottom line, for me, the new Mini will become my device for photography and video.

The iMac will do all the other stuff I do, mail, browsing, reading, writing, whatever. As long as I do my photography on the Mini, with the ASUS display, I should be all set, but I’ll do that work in the evenings, or with all my drapes and shades closed.

Thanks for posting. I’ll save that link for future reference.

Just out of interest, I calibrated my 27 in iMac for different colour temperatures.

The profiles did not differ (much) within a group calibrated e.g. for D50 at 80/100/120 but differed between the profiles for D50, D55 and D65:

The black line corresponds to the “horseshoe” we usually get when we check out profiles.
The white “ghost” depicts the outline of the profile made for D50/100. The coloured body corresponds to the profile made for D65/100. The profile for D50 displays more shades in the blue-cyan-green area as well as a tad brighter reds. Differences in the red-yellow-green area are small.

Images taken in Yxy view of the macOS ColorSync Utility.

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Can you please suggest an article I can read, which will help me understand what this image is trying to show me? Maybe I’m old, or more likely I never learned this stuff to begin with.

Maybe the question I should really be asking, is why should I care about this? What will it allow me to do or understand better than the little bit I understand now?

It took me a while to understand histograms, and how they are useful to me. The image you posted up above makes as much sense to me as when I look at the instrument panel in a modern jetliner. I know those instruments are useful to a pilot, and I assume the above image is useful to you, but maybe you should pretend I’m 7 years old, not 77. Come to think of it, maybe 7 year old’s actually do understand this. :slight_smile:

You don’t have to. It simply means that you can use a monitor profile with different brightness settings of your monitor, but not for different colour temperature settings.

There are small cars and bigger cars. Both can be used to drive across country. Bigger cars do it more comfortably and you can use both without knowing how automatic gearboxes work.

Imagine colour space as a multicoloured crystal that grows out of a black plane. Growing ever taller, colour is lost completely at its top. Looking onto the crystal from above gets you this image. It represents the colours the human eye can see under certain circumstances. Looking from the side, you see the shape above. It looks like parts have been cut off. All you see are the colours your monitor can display truely.