A whole lot of your sharpening issues are taste, paper and subject matter dependent. Don’t get all uptight about sharpening until you have the printer in hand and are ready to print a few. Plan to print on letter size paper first, or plan to set up and print segments of your image onto portions of your paper to see how sharpening (or not) works. I have a Canon Pixma Pro-1, and if I only have 13x19 paper in the paper I’m using, I’ll select an important part of my image and print only that portion, but at final print size, on different places on the same sheet of paper to see what I like, before the final print. I can do this easily in Photoshop, I haven’t tried printing from PL2 or 3.
Also, if you have the Nik Collection, I would definitely examine the output sharpening options in Sharpener Pro. I’ve used that often as a last step before outputting a file for inkjet or halftone reproduction.
Thank you Evildad. I’ m not using any Adobe products though. Also no Nik Collection
I commonly print A2 + on my Epson P800 with Epson Print Layout.
Today, after many tests, I output a 16-bit TIFF with PhotoLab, then with GigaPixel AI, I put it at definition A2 + in 360 dpi (native resolution at Epson) and finally, I use Nik Sharpener Pro with settings suitable for paper and an accent that rarely exceeds 25%
I don’ t have Nik Sharpener or Gigapixel AI…but how was the result?
Before using this procedure I have never had such good results; I will say that my prints seem naturally sharper with a stronger presence of the image.
Some time later now. I have bought the Canon Pro-1000 and I use Qimage One now. Very satisfied! At the moment I only use 2 different Hahnemühle Fine Art papers. Photo Rag 308 and Photo Rag Baryta. Both in A4 and A2 size. Very nice!
Workflow is now; shooting raw / import in DXO PL3 / export as 16bit tiff to Qimage One for printing. Staying in aRGB in Qimage One.
Thank you all for all advice!
I´m just wondering if you use Epson Print Layout in PL3 or do you use the PL3 printing module?
just saw this thread – you may check Printing - colour balance issue with PL 1.2
And no, I don’t use Epson Print Layout (anymore), while it can be helpful esp. with ABW.
For B&W I still use ABW-profiles from Eric Chan, but changed some settings in Epson P800 driver.
have fun, Wolfgang