Printing from Lightroom and Photoshop

[DanK]

I've always thought that I was cutting corners printing from LR rather than using the more laborious process of manually resizing in Photoshop. Today, spurred on by a what I thought was a very poorly done video on the topic, I did a test myself.

I figured that cropping an image to half its original size (in both directions) and printing to 17 x 22 is more extreme than anything I am likely to do, so that was my test. To make the test cheaper and faster, I cropped to ¼ of the original and printed on 8.5 x 11, which is a similar magnification.

I printed from each application directly.

I did four prints, two from Lightroom and two from Photoshop. In LR, I used standard and high output sharpening. In Photoshop, I used preserve details (1) to resize, which was the better of the two Photoshop options in the video I watched. I printed one with no output sharpening and another with smart sharpen set to 180%, radius 1 px, reduce noise 10%. I printed on Moab Exhibition Luster paper, using my Canon Prograf 1000.

The LR standard and PS without output sharpening are virtually indistinguishable. (This leads me to suspect that the “preserve details” option includes some sharpening.) The two more sharpened prints are a bit crisper than the first pair, but you have to stare for a bit to see it. Of the two more highly sharpened prints, the LR print is a tiny bit sharper, but its possible that I could have matched it by increasing the strength of smart sharpening in photoshop. In any event, in this case as well, one has to stare for a while, and I’m not convinced that we would all rank the four photos in the same order.

The bottom line for me is that printing from Lightroom, which is far easier (not just because one needn't resize manually, but also because of its templates and the like) will produce pretty much the same quality as manually resizing in Photoshop. So, I’ll continue using Lightroom. The only thing this comparison will lead me to change my procedure is that in the case of images with very fine detail, I may set print sharpening to high.

[pschlute]

Not clear from your post.... are you resizing the image to a physical size eg. (inches x inches x(ppi))

[DanK]

Not clear from your post.... are you resizing the image to a physical size eg. (inches x inches x(ppi))

Yes, that was the point of the exercise. Sorry it wasn't clear. I should have added two other pieces of information that define the uprezzing: the size of my sensor, 5613 x 3742, and the native resolution of my printer, which is 300 dpi. I am resizing a 1/4 by 1/4 crop of the original to roughly 8.5 x 11 inches, which is pretty substantial uprezzing. I first printed in LR, which can display the area of the actually printed image. I then imposed those dimensions in the resizing box in Photoshop.

[pschlute]

Yes, that was the point of the exercise. Sorry it wasn't clear. I should have added two other pieces of information that define the uprezzing: the size of my sensor, 5613 x 3742, and the native resolution of my printer, which is 300 dpi. I am resizing a 1/4 by 1/4 crop of the original to roughly 8.5 x 11 inches, which is pretty substantial uprezzing. I first printed in LR, which can display the area of the actually printed image. I then imposed those dimensions in the resizing box in Photoshop.

Sorry, I am unclear what uprezzing is. If you have a 5613*3742 image you should be able to print successfully at 18.7x 12.47 inches using 300 ppi. i know ppi is not the same a dpi.

[Manfred M]

Sorry, I am unclear what uprezzing is. If you have a 5613*3742 image you should be able to print successfully at 18.7x 12.47 inches using 300 ppi. i know ppi is not the same a dpi.

Carefully said, I believe Dan is taking an image that has been prepared for a 17" x 22" print and then cropped out an 8.5" x 11" piece to print, so he has in fact "up-rezzed". With up-rezzing comes image softening as the editing software has to create pixels.

While ppi and dpi are not equal, one can assume they are when setting the image size to print size. This allows the user to by-pass the printer's resizing engine and produces output that has been determined by the editing software / user.

[DanK]

I'll try to make this clearer.

The relationship between ppi and dpi is that if there is no up- or downrezzing, each pixel is displayed as a dot when printed. So, the maximum size that can be printed without uprezzing, in inches, is the number of pixels available divided by the dpi of the printer. (I assume that people in much of the world would use pixels and dots per cm.)

What I wanted to see is the effect of uprezzing if I cropped by half in both dimensions and printed at 17 x 22. With my 5D II sensor, cropping by 50% leaves roughly (I'll round a bit) 2800 x 1900 pixels. At 300 dpi, the largest this can be printed without uprezzing is a bit over 9 x 3 inches. So, it requires quite extreme uprezzing to print 17 x 22.

To do this without spending a lot of money and time (it takes a long time to print a high res 17 x 22 on my printer), I scaled everything down by a factor of 2: I cropped to 25% rather than 50% of the original in each dimension and printed on paper half as large in each dimension (8.5 x 11). The uprezzing factor is the same.

I should say that none of these 4 looked all that wonderful. I would never print with this degree of uprezzing. I deliberately made the uprezzing extreme for two reasons: to make sure that it is (more than) an upper bound to what I actually do, and to make it severe enough to show artifacts.