How to Improve Your Printing - Pip Shepley

BCA Photo Group member Pip Shepley gave an informative and well-received presentation on printing at our January 22 Technical Series meeting, with approximately 30 people in attendance. Pip talked about his own long journey in improving his printing and shared techniques and tips from the numerous classes he has taken, studying under some of the leaders in the field. The talking points were supported by live demos of workflow cases in both Photoshop and Lightroom, the use of soft proofing, and the use of test images to see how well the monitor and the printer reproduce tonal ranges.

Pip has provided us with a set of digital files that you can download here by clicking on the entry:

  1. Copy of PIp’s presentation (pdf)

  2. Copy of the printed handout of resources that Pip had at the meeting (pdf)

  3. Desktop grayscale - an image that can be used to simplify your background when working on images (jpg)

  4. Shadow checker - lowest quartile of 256-step brightness scale (jpg)

  5. Shadow checker - lowest quartile of 0 - 100% brightness scale (jpg)

  6. Adobe Carmen Miranda image, good for testing printing of colors and brightness variations (jpg)

  7. Printer evaluation image (from Jack Flesher) with variety of color and gray scales and varying image types (jpg)

  8. Document (from Jack Flesher) that describes how to use the printer evaluation image above (pdf)

  9. 256 step gray scale image (jpg)

He also mentioned several books that are good resources for getting started. The information on these is in the handout, but for your convenience follow these links: