Printing High Res....loss of detail

[RhinoFreak]

Itd prolly help to list what kinda printer your using...

[Rens]

What is the image size in pixels and what is the paper size you're printing it on?

Could you describe exactly why it's looking bad?

If the image is washed out then it probably is a colour/calibration issue.

[andrewjohn81]

please post what printer you are using, brand and model. that will help people tell you what you need to do. It may be them telling you that you need a new printer.
as mentioned, paper also makes a difference.

If the brown areas are the problem, do the cmyk conversion directly in photoshop. That usually changes the color very slightly, but will print alot closer to what you see on many printer models. Show the gamut warning and that will give you some good info. This is mostly prevelant on Lexmark and HP printers. Epson usually has problems with reds.

In your printer drivers make sure that you have the correct settings. Don't let it do anything automatic for you, such as smoothing, contrast adjustments, or red eye removal. Often these settings are defaulted to ON when you select photopaper.
Select photopaper. Select the best matte, or the best glossy, depending on which one you have. If you didn't use the best paper, you still want to select the best paper setting. This fools the printer into thinking that you used the best stuff. It's a marketing scam to get you to buy the best paper. It doesn't change much, but it does change a little. Using the better paper also Does make a bit of a differece, but no matter what, choose the best paper setting.

Calibrated monitor? Many people say they calibrate their monitor, but don't do this correctly. The colors are never going to match unless you spend a crap load of money on calibrating tools. The values, however, should be really close if you do it right. Just in case you didn't, or someone is reading this that doesn't know here is the easiest way to get the most out of your monitor:
Go to photoshop and create a gradient from left to right. Make sure and hold shift to draw a straight line. Make the image alot longer than tall. Now, posterize it to at least 25. You should get a series of squares that are single color grey. Now, if you can tell the difference between each square, then your monitor is close enough.

The reason you only need that many, is most every printer can only display that many colors grey. The printers under 200 bucks can only really do about 20 shades of grey. I know, that sucks.

Ok, that's all the time i have now. Hope that helps a bit.

[MikeBracken]

Thanks for the replies. Im using a HP Deskjet 5550.

It seems like my printer doesnt know how to mix some of the colors, and so tries to pick the next closest color.(did that make sense?) The biggest problem is some of the details are missing. In the picture of the bottles you can see the caustics on the ground plane really well. But when I print it you can no longer see any evidence of caustics, just shadows.

Im rendering at 5248 x 3936. Paper is photo paper ...8 x 10.

BTW .....RhinoFreak (http://www.cgtalk.com/member.php?u=90090) .....Awesome paintball gun!

[andrewjohn81]

That definitely helps. You are correct, your printer doesn't know how to mix some of those colors.

First, in Photoshop, convert to CMYK. That printer doesn't do it very well....although getting the newest drivers may help a little bit.
Second...make sure you have the 58 cartridge installed. That will help dramatically. That adds two more colors as well as a photo black. That helps you not get that matte look on the black only. That's one way you can spot a digital print miles away. That set you back about 25 dollars. Sorry.

Tell your printer you put in premium plus glossy/matte (which ever you put in, glossy or matte). you don't have to buy that paper, just lie to the printer and tell it that you have that. Don't tell it you are using "other" photo paper. It actually lowers the quality. There's a long explaination why they can legally do that and get away with it, but it makes sense.
make sure, in the photo section of the print drivers, that all the enhancements are turned off. They will change a bit of your color info. Don't print borderless unless you want some of your image chopped off. It's nice, but you will loose a bit of your image, so just keep that in mind as well.

You don't want to change your dpi to 300. You are actually looking somewhere closer to 450 dpi. In photoshop make sure resample image is unchecked. Now change, in inches, to the size that you want to print. it will change the dpi for you. You printer can accept up to 2400 dpi, but please don't do that. it can actually only print at 300. The heads are each offset. that's how you get the claimed 4800dpi. If you say, 300dpi, then you will have to hit the print preview button, then rezise the image there. Well, that actually changes the image. you don't want that. Since you have the print info there, keep it. you didn't render larger than you needed for nothing. (by the way, you only need to render about 3200pixels wide to get print on 8.5x11)

hope you get some better results.

If you want to kill your printer and get a new one, then the best bang for a small pocket is the Canon p4000. I think that's the model. it's about 150 right now. I use to have your printer. I used that canon a few times and it just blew it out of the water.

[MikeBracken]

andrewjohn....thanks for the info ! Ill try your suggestions and let you know how it turns out.

My printer is definatly not that great.Ive been putting off getting a new one because my wife likes for printing photos.

Again ,thanks for the quick reply.:thumbsup:

[Hazdaz]

I think the question also needs to be asked... did you actually render your images at 5248 x 3936 pixels?? (which is actually much higher than you needed to if all you printed it out at was 8 x 10")

Or did you render it at a lower rez and just upsampled them in Photoshop??

And I assume the images looked clean and sharp on your screen when you zoomed in to 100%, right?

[MikeBracken]

I read an article on the web that said to multiply the resolution ,eg ,640 x 480 ,by 8.2 each. I thought it was a little to high too because my digital camera takes pics at 2048 x 1536 and when I print out 8 x 10s they look great.But Im new to printing digital images.

What would be the correct sizing formula for printing digital images ?

Is there a rule of thumb for resampling pictures from 72 dpi to 300 dpi using photoshop ?

Thanks for the help. Its nice to have a place to get help from so many cool people. I have learned so much from the CGTalk community.

"And I assume the images looked clean and sharp on your screen when you zoomed in to 100%, right?"

It looked great at 100 %. Just not when I printed it out. The picture was sharp on the printout ,it was just loosing some detail. And a little bit of color change.

Thanks again.

[-Vormav-]

Well, the higher resolution definitely gives you a bit more flexibility with print sizes, though you'd have to resample to fit the image onto one page. Just think about the size you're printing to and multiply that by 300 (size of the image*DPI) to get the resolution you want. So for a great 8 1/2"x11" print, you'd want 2550x3300 resolution (I'm not taking any cropping into account).
You don't want to change your dpi to 300. You are actually looking somewhere closer to 450 dpi.
That kind of threw me off. Why do you say he should look for 450 dpi? Just because he has a much higher resolution to start with?


I've always been a little confused as to how digital photographers get such good quality prints out of some of their images; I've seen people with 4mp digital cameras (that's around 1600x2400 max res.) pull out perfect, photo-quality 8.5x11" prints from their shots. Maybe getting up to 300dpi isn't all that important, or maybe good interpolation is what makes it possible? :curious:
:shrug:

[Hazdaz]

Even 300DPI is over kill... let alone 450DPI which is a total waste of time and memory.

Outputing to a regular inkjet printer you shouldnt need to ever go mroe than 200 to 250 DPI max. If an image was being used in a magazine, then I could see 300 or MAYBE 450, but nothing ever higher than that.

[andrewjohn81]

300dpi is not overkill. There are 154 jets on that printer. The printhead is one half inch. That is 300 dots per inch. If you actually print out a good image, then print it out again, downsampled at 150dpi you DO notice a difference.

And most mags asside from some design magazines and playboy don't use much higher than 150. They use offset printing, so it is a completely different process. Only on an inkjet printer can you actually measure the dots per inch. oh, and dot matrix. Even laser printers use a different process.

[Hazdaz]

There is no 1 to 1 corrilation between jets on a print head and the DPI of the image you are printing. It SOUNDS like its a nice relationship there, but it just doesn't work out that way in real life - a purple pixel in my image, is not 1 purple dot of ink, its a mixture of cyan and magenta dots. The printer will (and should) always have a much higher DPI resolution than your image. For instance you would never, ever, ever save an image out to 1440DPI - even though that is was companies like Epson say their pritners have a resolution of.

If you want to save all you images at 300+DPI then go for it, but anything more than about 200-250 is overkill.

[MikeBracken]

Thanks for all the helpfull hints. I have not had a chance to print any more images yet, but ill let you all know what I find out (if your interested...lol). I definatly appreciate all the feed back. This forum rocks!:thumbsup:

[Thykka]

I've always been a little confused as to how digital photographers get such good quality prints out of some of their images; I've seen people with 4mp digital cameras (that's around 1600x2400 max res.) pull out perfect, photo-quality 8.5x11" prints from their shots. Maybe getting up to 300dpi isn't all that important, or maybe good interpolation is what makes it possible?

BTW if you want to make large prints of small res photographs (don't think this works with cg-images tho') just resample your image to the desired size and apply a hint of noise. It makes your pic look sharper than it actually is when printed ;)

[-Vormav-]

Okay, a bit off topic for the Max forum, but as long as we're talking about print resolutions...
Say you have a 720x720 image with a resolution of 72 dpi; that's a 10x10" print. Could there conceivably be any advantage to resampling this image to 1440x1440, and setting the document size to a 10x10 so that you're instead dealing with a resampled 144dpi version of the same picture instead of just using the 72dpi version for print?
I guess I'm also confused about ppi in printers; if you print a 72dpi image, does that correspond directly to the ppi that you'll get when you print this (IE will you have 72 dots per inch on your print), or will your printer (or software) interpolate to get a different ppi number?

[MikeBracken]

Any more suggestions on a good printer for printing digital (CG) images. I have a budget of about $400 or less. I know its not much, but Im about to throw the HP out the window :scream: (lol). Any suggestions would be great.
Thanks again.

[Hazdaz]

$400!! I wouldn't even spend 1/2 that on a printer.
I have been and always will be an Epson guy. You can get a great printer for well under $200 and print images that are photo quality (with the right paper). The ONLY thing that sux about inkjet printers is the cost of ink - but that is a problem with ALL inkjet printers, not just Epsons.

[MikeBracken]

Another Question. For printing cg images, is it better to use glossy paper or matte? Mabey my loss of detail is due to the paper finish? This is very frustrating. They always look great on my PC, then I print, and they end up looking like crap.

Thanks.

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