Photo Printing at Home
And then I found the blog of Bruce Percy, who says “Good edits come from improved visual awareness”, in his “Good printing means good editing“ blog post. He also writes: “You can’t make a good print from a badly edited image, and likewise, you can’t make a good edit without printing it to evaluate it.“ – I concur!
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I also noticed that most of my photos were developed too bright. The “expose to the right” technique mislead me (I try to expose as bright as possible without blowing the highlights, and as a result, some of my photos are very bright when I first import them into Lightroom). I’ve learned to consider more consciously what and where the individual tones are, based on the histogram. Lightroom’s separation into Blacks, Shadows, Exposure (midtones), Highlights, Whites helps with that. If an area that should be entirely in the midtones responds to moving the Highlights slider, then perhaps something is a bit off, and it’s “Exposure” that needs an adjustment.
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Resolution isn’t that important either. With the 18×12″ (45x30cm) prints that I can produce at home, even a good 6 megapixel photo will print fine (it’s still ~160 pixels per inch).
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I would have started this much, much sooner in my photographic career.
