Adobe Photoshop CS5 One-on-One

Printing to an Inkjet Printer

When it comes to printing full-color photographic images, your best,
most affordable solution is an inkjet printer. Available from Epson,
Hewlett-Packard, and a cadre of others, a typical inkjet printer
often costs less than a hundred dollars. In return, it’s capable of
delivering outstanding color and definition (see the sidebar “Qual-
ity Comes at a Price,” on page 480), as good as or even better than
you can achieve from your local commercial print house. But you
can’t reproduce artwork for mass distribution from a color inkjet
printout. Inkjet printers are strictly for personal use.

In the following exercise, you’ll learn how to get the best results
from your inkjet device. If you don’t have a color inkjet printer, you
won’t be able to achieve every step of the exercise, but you can fol-
low along and get an idea of how the process works.

Assuming you have an inkjet device at your disposal, please load it
with the best paper you have on hand, ideally a few sheets of glossy
or matte-finish photo paper, readily available at any office supply
store (again, see “Quality Comes at a Price” for more information).
If you don’t have such paper, or if you simply don’t feel like parting
with the good stuff for this exercise, go ahead and load what you
have. Just remember what kind of paper you loaded so you can ad-
dress it properly in Steps 15 and 16 on page 478.

1. Open the test image. Look in the Lesson 12 folder
   inside Lesson Files-PsCS5 1on1 and you’ll find a file
   called The Joy of Color.psd. Pictured in Figure 12-4
   on the next page, it’s a color-matching file I created with help
   from the photographic contribution of Jason Stitt from image
   vendor Fotolia.com. The image is sized at 7.5-by-5 inches with
   a resolution of 300 pixels per inch. But as you’ll discover, print
   size can be changed on-the-fly to fit the medium.


2. Choose the Flatten Image command. This file contains a handful
   of layers, including a text layer that’s currently turned off. (If you
   get a warning about updating text go ahead and click Update.)
   As you may recall from Lesson 11, text and shape layers can be
   output at the maximum resolution of a PostScript-compatible
   printer, but very few inkjet devices include PostScript proces-
   sors (and those that do are expensive). So the layers won’t help
   the image’s print quality. Layers also require more computation
   and thus slow down the print process. Best solution: Get rid of
   them by choosing Layer→Flatten Image.

The primary colors of light, RGB

The primary colors of pigment, CMY

Magenta

White

Yellow

Cyan

Green

Blue

Red

Green

Near black

Blue

Red

Magenta

Yellow

Cyan

Figure 12-3.

PeaRl Of WISDOm

Obviously, I have no idea what printer you’re

using, so your experience may diverge from

mine starting at Step 14, as I explain in the

exercise. And I must leave it up to you to make

sure your printer is set up properly and is in

working order. This means the power is turned

on, the printer is connected to your computer,

print drivers and other software are installed,

the printer is loaded with plenty of paper and

ink, and the print head nozzles are clean. For

more information on any of these issues, see the

documentation that came with your printer.

Printing to an Inkjet Printer 423