Printing Images

[Roy]

Does anyone print their astro-images with the intention of having them framed, and if so what type of paper do you use?

Roy

[Mac]

I have printed a few of mine over the years,
I used to have Canon BJC600 with bottled ink which saved a fortune, somewhere in the region of £5-6k of the cost of ink.
Especially as it would cost about 250 to swap all of the ink cartridges.

I always used the best photographic gloss papaer available.
Couldnt tell what that is today as i've not printed anything my self for years.

It took quite a few photos to actually get the best results as you have to tweek the settings as opposed to go with what the manufacturer just says.

First get a test image https://www.northlight-images.co.uk/printer-test-images/

Print that and get your image to look like the on screen image (not easy)
save that as the profile and your off.

I Eventually i got rid of my printer and inks as i moved the inks one day and came home to a flooded pool of ink on my desktop 

Now i just process any images, save them as either TIFF of Photoshop and just take them down to my local print shop. If they ask if you want it process always decline first.

Cant falult the print shop images, especially the black and white ones.

Mac

[Carole]

Not really resolved this question as if I ever take images to the local print shop they always come out too dark.

I did have a book printed in 2019 of my images (to preserve them) and the printer I used was very good and I was expecting the colours to darken like they do for the calenders with Printed.com - but they didn't and they gave an excellent and helpful service. 

I think the printers I used were BookprintersUK but not sure if they do anything other than books.
https://www.bookprintinguk.com/

I am planning a 2nd book in about a years time when I have enough to go in it, and was going to get an extra copy printed so I could use some of the pages to put in picture frames.

Let me know Roy if you resolve this. 

Carole

[Roy]

Hi Carole,

I watched a couple of videos about printing in general and what they say to do is turn down the brightness of your monitor to about half what you normally work under, that way you'll get a much truer idea of how the image will appear on paper. Here's a couple of excellent links I viewed.

Roy