What's the solution?

I take photo my camera but the problem is ,my pictures look fine on the screen but when i print theses the quality is not so good. Is it the problem of photo paper?But i also use a new printer .What's the solution? Any help...

How do they look if you print on a different printer? That's what I'd try next. Also be sure your camera is capturing high resolution files. Low resolution will look ok on the screen but not so great printed.
What camera?
What printer?
What if you print a photo from someone else on your printer?

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Originally Posted by Al Arafat

I take photo my camera but the problem is ,my pictures look fine on the screen but when i print theses the quality is not so good. Is it the problem of photo paper?But i also use a new printer .What's the solution? Any help...

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There are many down falls with printing.
1) Not using the factory ink (third party inks)
2) Not using a compatible printer paper ie: should be using HP paper with an HP printer, other paper after testing
3) Not keeping DPI of the print above 150 Dots per inch(DPI)
4) Monitor not showing true color

Things that make a good print
1) Do NOT resize the image (ie: smaller)
2) Do NOT save to JPG during editing (use tiff 16 bit if editing from raw files, BMP files at 24 bit just like JPG files 8 bit per color) Opening and Saving using JPG removes picture and color information each time.
3) You need a 3 mega pixel file to get an reasonable 8 by 10 print (150 DPI printing resolution) a 6 mega pixel file will give you a photographic quality print at 300 DPI pinting

freygr, I agree with all of that except the resizing. I ALWAYS resize for print. If you force the printer to resize the image, then it will also resize the sharpening halos accordingly. I'm retentive about the size of my sharpening halos in print. But then, I'm retentive about sharpening in general :)

The goal for me is always to get the image size to match the printer's native resolution. That way, sharpening halos are passed through being neither increased nor decreased in size.

- Joe U.

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Originally Posted by Medley

freygr, I agree with all of that except the resizing. I ALWAYS resize for print. If you force the printer to resize the image, then it will also resize the sharpening halos accordingly. I'm retentive about the size of my sharpening halos in print. But then, I'm retentive about sharpening in general :)

The goal for me is always to get the image size to match the printer's native resolution. That way, sharpening halos are passed through being neither increased nor decreased in size.

- Joe U.

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But if you let the printer resize the image smaller, then you get the best image possible, but up-scaling does not improve the output at all.

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Originally Posted by freygr

But if you let the printer resize the image smaller, then you get the best image possible, but up-scaling does not improve the output at all.

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Let me explain why I don't believe the first part is true. I'll start by identifying my goal. After much trial and error, I've discovered that for my set-up, printed sharpening halos that are 1/100 of an inch provide the best increase in contrast without being perceptible to the human eye. So that's my goal- 1/100 inches, in print.

Now, have you ever noticed that when you reduce the size of an image, it gets perceptibly sharper? There's two possible reasons for that- either the contrast at the edges is being increased, or the sharpening halos are getting larger. In theory, neither one should happen. But in actuality, the algorithm that's used to reduce the image size is applying MORE reduction in the low contrast areas, and LESS in the high contrast areas. The theory there is that reduction in relatively monotone areas will be less noticeable. Since the sharpening halos are some of the highest contrast areas, they get reduced the least. Hence, larger sharpening halos (relative to the image size) and a visibly sharper reduced image.

If THAT'S true, then the amount of sharpening is going to be proportional to the amount of reduction. A 4x6 print of a given image will be sharper than, say, an 8x10 print. How much the halos are going to be enlarged will be difficult to judge, because it will vary according to the content of the image, and where the algorithm makes its reductions. So saying that "if you let the printer resize the image smaller, then you get the best image possible" is only true if you're willing to accept a number of variables in your sharpening, which I'm not. Remember, my goal is printed halos that are 1/100 of an inch. So I needed to find a way to control these variables.

My solution is to reduce the image first, THEN sharpen. I can't keep the variables out of the image, but I can let them affect the image as they will, and then decide how much ADDITIONAL sharpening to add in pp to get to my desired goal. If I do it right, the printer passes the halos through without increasing or decreasing them, and I've regained control of the final halo size.

Btw, it works in reverse for enlarging images. It actually decreases the size of the sharpening halos. But again, I can account for that in pp- at least to a point. You always have to accept that at some point, enlarging images will degrade them beyond your ability to 'fix'.

And all of this is just FYI. If your workflow works for you, that's great. Like I said, I'm just retentive about my sharpening- and sharpening is the ONLY place this makes any difference. Admittedly, it's a lot of extra work to create a separate file for each print size. I just like controlling the image from capture to print.

- Joe U

Well that is what you feel, but all the printers I had since the Espon 720i ??? have printed at 1440 dpi.... so the image is up scaled by the printer regardless. The problems with your sharping halos only come into play with small image files. The example of photo quality 4 x 6 inch print contains 2.2 mega pixels. I have seen any cameras with that small of image sensors since 2000. That size of image file can not be printed at 8 by 10 and look good, the information is not there. But a 6 mega pixel file can be printed in a 8 x 12 inch print and it can look great (depending of the image it self). and would just as good as a 4 x 6 or smaller printed from the same file.

The point is you never want to mess with the original file, always edit a copy of your original! The viewing distance has a major effect on the minimum DPI which you can print at with out quality problems. I have printed great looking photos at 150 DPI printed, but it's was the quality of the image which let me.

Once you resized smaller you can never resize up as you will never regain the lost data from the image.

So when you print at 1140, what size are your sharpening halos?

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Originally Posted by Medley

So when you print at 1140, what size are your sharpening halos?

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The printer I use produces the image as it is on my monitor. The only time I have extensively used the unsharp mask, or sharping (depending on your software) is after scanning old snap shots from film or prints (120, 134 etc).

If the image needs sharping I messed up. 1) I did not take into account the DOF (deep of field) F stop on the lens too open. 2) Camera movement telephoto lens with to long of an shutter. 3) Or any other common errors which I over looked.

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Originally Posted by freygr

The printer I use produces the image as it is on my monitor. The only time I have extensively used the unsharp mask, or sharping (depending on your software) is after scanning old snap shots from film or prints (120, 134 etc).

If the image needs sharping I messed up. 1) I did not take into account the DOF (deep of field) F stop on the lens too open. 2) Camera movement telephoto lens with to long of an shutter. 3) Or any other common errors which I over looked.

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Well, with that workflow, you're correct. If you don't sharpen, you don't need to worry about halos. But images are softened at three distinct points in the workflow: forcing real-world colors into the camera's gamut; Sensor array averaging, (for those not using full-frame); and conversion from square pixels to round ink dots/ dot gain. I've yet to see a 1440 or 2880 printer that can fully counteract all three- though it does make great strides in the dot gain area.

A 1440 printer will much more accurately reproduce any image you send it. But if you send it an image that looks good on your screen, I guarantee I would consider it too soft for print- and the printer will reproduce that soft print much more accurately. It's not that I'm behind the times- our individual definitions of 'sharp' seems to be the issue.

And without comparing prints, there's no way I can show you the difference visually. So I suppose we're left agreeing to disagree.

Any image which does not look good on my screen, I don't print. But there is a catch, you can have a good looking image on the screen but if the image size is 1024 x 768 pixels you are not going to get any good looking large prints as the original file is two small.

The cameras have sharping settings built in. The best quality is the RAW file format: all sharpening, color balance done after transfer to your computer. I use the JPG + RAW selection on my camera. If I decide to print I process the RAW image then save it as 16 bit TIFF (saving the 12 bit raw color depth). Note I do not resize the file size for printing the same file would be used from wallet size to poster (have to send out anything over 13 inches wide) and I have not had any problems with quality of the printed photos.

In-camera sharpening provides reasonable (though hardly ever optimal) results with no user intervention, and thus is a great time saver. But in-camera sharpening is a global, one-size-fits-all process that doesn't address any of the shortcomings of Photoshop's sharpening algorithms.

For example, the Unsharp Mask filter (which is essentially the same algorithm used in-camera), provides the most sharpening to the edges with the highest contrast, and the least sharpening to the edges with the lowest contrast. That's pretty much backwards of what we want, but it's easily overcome by applying the blend-if sliders to the sharpening layer to exclude the lightest and darkest parts of the layer. Then you can apply the filter with an increased amount, excluding the high contrast edges, and confining it to the areas with the lowest contrast. The end result, if done correctly, even beats PS's Smart Sharpen filter.

A second problem for me is the Threshold. It's designed to hold off applying sharpening to an area until the difference in contrast between neighboring pixels reaches a certain amount. The goal is to protect textured areas and prevent sharpening in areas such as a slightly noisy sky or skin tones. But at low (1-4) settings, Threshold may not adequately protect those areas, and at higher (4+) settings, it can produce an unnatural transition between sharpened and unsharpened areas. A better (IMO) solution is to use a layer mask.

But I can't use blend-if sliders or layer masks with in-camera sharpening. It's great if you're working in a time-constraint mode. But for me, it kind of like shooting Jpeg-only when your camera's capable of Raw.