Hi all. As you may be aware we offer a complete in-house printing service from standard lab printing through our kiosks in-store and via the Fujifilm Imagine Ireland Portal and via an app on your smartphone to bespoke large format printing on our Epson inkjet printer.
When using the automated printing through Fujifilm Imagine on the kiosks or app the software does all the work for you when it comes to resizing and correcting colour casts etc. The only thing to watch out for when using this service is cropping. The software will try to get it right but generally just centers your image within the print. Once you check the preview on the screen and move the crop if necessary all will be good.
Most professionals and camera club members will not want their images printed through the kiosks or app as they will have already have edited, adjusted and cropped their images to suit their needs. When it comes to cropping and resizing people are often confused with the ratios and resolutions that we print at. I will describe how below very quickly.
Basically both of our printers print best at 300dpi. That means you will get the best sharpness and accurate printing if you size your images at 300dpi. So if you want an image printed at 10 inch by 8 inch it needs to be 10x8 @ 300dpi. Here is a little screen shot video of how to do that in Photoshop
I hope that was self explanatory but the basics are simple. Have your image open on the screen. Select the crop tool (or hit ‘c’ on the keyboard), select ‘W x H x Resolution’, type in the desired width and height and then 300dpi, move the crop box to where you want, double click to confirm the crop, sharpen the image and finally save it to wherever you want being careful not to overwrite the original! Simple.
Now if you only use Lightroom it's quite different. Personally I would use a combination of both but again you don't have to. Here is a short video describing how to crop and export from Lightroom
So the main difference is that you are working with ratios instead of actual lengths and widths. So in this case we chose a 4x5/10x8 ratio and exported it at 300dpi. In the export dialogue in Lightroom we resized the long edge to be 10 inch. Because the proportions are set at 4x5 it will automatically then make the other edge 8 inches. Doing it this way ensures that if you are exporting more than one image at a time that all the long edges, be it horizontal or vertical with be 10 inches and the short edges will be 8 inches. It sounds complex but its really not. Try it a few times until you get comfortable with it! In the video I apply my sharpening in Photoshop instead of Lightroom. Again thats a personal preference so you can ignore that last part if you sharpen in Lightroom! Thats it. Easy. Any questions please do not hesitate to ask!