About two years ago, I posted a blog post entitled The Quest for Perfect Home Photography Printing. In the time since, I have continued to learn and advanced my skills at printing. This is a start of a series of tips to help you get better prints either at home or with a lab.

Tip: Get your exposure right

If you participate in online forums or Facebook groups on photography printing, without fail, new users will come in daily with a comment problem — the printed image is too dark! Frustration due to the wasted money usually follows the question of why the print looks so bad. I am going to break this down into a couple of key concepts.

More times than not, the more experienced printers will talk about a “color managed workflow” and “monitor calibration”. To an extent, this conversation is well grounded. In fact, I use Datacolor products to color manage my workflow. An important part of the calibration process is setting your monitor to just the right brightness, or should I say dimness, and working in largely a darkened room. For those of us that have their computers in rooms that are not cave dark, using brighter displays is essential. So, if the monitor is bright, your images will look bright on the screen. And when this happens, your prints are guaranteed to be too dark. Here is why.

First, your monitor emits lights. Your prints will need to reflect light. If you view a print in the dark, it will be dark. If you view even a dim smartphone in the dark, you will see the room light up. This is in part why editing in a dark room with a dim monitor will give you better results. As noted above, this is not possible for most people, so there is a trick all printers need to know. You need to use the histogram.

The histogram is an attribute of the image file and not of the monitor. Changing your monitor brightness will have no impact on the exposure. I present two examples of histograms below. These are the same image and both look reasonably good on the screen. Which will print better?

Take a moment to look at the histograms before moving forward. For those not familiar with histograms, the shadows are on the left. The highlights are on the right. Printing requires highlights and shifting the histogram will be the single biggest image editing step you can do to give better results. Based on these examples, Exposure Setting 2 will give much better results. So the tip is this — before sending anything to the printer, check the histogram. Memorize the shapes and mentally compare the results to the printed image. You will soon learn where you like the histogram and it will be, as you will discover, shifted to the right.

What about blown highlights? (histogram 2 shows them, can you see why?)

Embrace them! Forget all the pixel peeping woes you hear online about blown highlights when you are printing on fine part papers. Unlike viewing on a screen, the blown highlights tell the printer to not lay down any ink there. What remains, is the texture and warmth of your paper. This creates very natural looking images and help the print become one with the paper. If given the choice of muddy shadows and dull appearance or shadow details and blown highlights, take the latter every time.