Prior to printing an image, there are several factors that should be considered.  Image dimensions Resolution Colour profile Image format (usually either high quality JPEG or TIFF) The gamut of the colours in the printer to ensure it can print the colours in your image.
You can purchase a colour calibrator which will compare the colours on a monitor to the colours on a test print. This will give you a colour profile for a specific printer and computer. Using this prior to printing your images ensures that the colours are as accurate as possible; thus avoiding printing the same image multiple times to produce the desired outcome. 

What to do with the colour profile created by this process: Computer > Profiles> Colour Sync
Drag and drop the colour profile created by the calibrator program into this section of your computer.

To avoid your image being cropped when printed: Image > canvas size
This increases the canvas size from the centre outwards. Adding a few centimetres to the canvas around the image means that you are less likely to loose any of the photo itself when printing due to the size of the paper. This way it will have a white border, which is preferable to a cut-off image.

In preferences, transparency and gamut you may need to change the Gamut Warning – it is best that you select a colour that is not in the image that you are printing. This should further ensure

Soft Proofing
Customise Proof Condition > Device to Simulate > Select the colour profile that you have saved earlier (generated by calibrator program)

Colour Gamut: To ascertain if there are any colours that cannot be printed on the image itself, select View > Gamut Warning
In order to bring any colour warnings back into Gamut we can use an adjustment layer. This may either be HSL or Curves. In Photoshop you can add a new adjustment layer and chose to either modify the colours showing in the Gamut Warming. It is important that this is done to avoid having to print an image multiple times to correct the colour issue. If the issue is not easily corrected you can try adding multiple adjustment layers and/or using an adjustment brush to manually and selectively change (desaturating, brightening or darkening) the colours that are showing in the warning.

Printing: Colour Handling >Photoshop
In the printing window, you should ensure that the colours are being managed by Photoshop rather than the printer so as to keep all of your changes made in the previous steps (Gamut and Colour profile).


After the lesson I felt overloaded with information, but I think its best that I have it documented here in the blog for me to refer back to later – as I’m sure I wont remember it all accurately.