Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [301]
Ensuring your prints are centered
We would all love Photoshop printing to be simpler, but unfortunately there are no easy solutions and this is not necessarily all Adobe's fault either. The problem is that you have a multitude of different printer devices out there and in addition to this, you have different operating systems, each of which has its own protocols as to how the system print dialogs should be organized.
Making sure a print is centered is just one of several problems that require a little user intervention. If you center a print in the Photoshop Print dialog, but it doesn't print centered, this is probably due to the default margin settings being uneven. The reason for this is that some printers require a trailing edge margin that is wider than all the other margins. However, as I have shown below in Figure 13.14, you can overcome this by creating your own custom paper sizes and margin settings.
Figure 13.14 On Mac OS X, go to the Page Setup menu and choose ‘Manage Custom Sizes…’ from the Paper Size menu. In the Custom Page Sizes dialog check the margin width for the bottom trailing edge margin for the selected printer. If you want your prints to always be centered, all you have to do is to adjust the Top margin width so that it matches this bottom measurement. Set a Width and Height for the new paper size and save this as a new paper size setting and add ‘centered’ so you can easily locate it when configuring the Page Setup or Paper Size settings
Custom print profiles
As I have mentioned already, the profiles that are shipped with the latest inkjet printers, and especially those for the Epson models, can be considered reliable enough for professional print quality work (providing you are using the manufacturer's branded papers). If you want to extend the range of papers you can print with, then you will either have to rely on the profiles supplied by these paper companies or consider having a custom printer profile built for each paper type.
One option is to purchase a complete calibration kit package such as the X-Rite Eye-One Photo with ProfileMaker software. The other alternative is to get an independent color management expert to build a profile for you. There are quite a few individuals who are able to offer these services, such as Andrew Rodney, who is based in the US (www.digitaldog.net). If you refer to the back of this book, you'll see that a company called colourmanagement.net are also offering a special coupon to readers that entitles you to a discount on their remote printer profiling services.
Remote profiling is a simple process. All you have to do is to follow the link to the provider's website, download a test target similar to the one shown in Figure 13.15 and follow the instructions closely when preparing a target print for output. The system print dialog settings used to produce the target print should also be saved so that these exact same print settings can be used again when you then follow the steps outlined on pages 690–695.
Figure 13.15 Here is an example of an X-Rite color target that can be used to build an ICC color profile. The target file must be opened without any color conversion and sent directly to the printer without any color management and the print dimensions must remain exact. If it is necessary to resize the PPI resolution, make sure that the ‘Nearest Neighbor’ interpolation mode is selected.
You then send the printed target to the supplied address, where the patch readings are used to build an ICC profile that represents the characteristics of a particular paper type on your individual printer. You'll then usually receive back an ICC profile via email.
Replacing canned profiles
I don't have room to go into too much detail here, but on the Mac system at least, if you are familiar with using the ColorSync Utility, you can go to the Devices section, select a canned profile, click on the Current Profile name, choose ‘Other…’ and select