This is a quick overview of the process I go through in taking an image from the camera through to a print. It was originally written for the local camera club.

Import

Get the image onto your computer somehow.

Once you’ve done this there are a couple of things I’ll do before anything else:

1. (Ignore if using Lightroom) if you’re using an application that allows it, change to 16 bit per channel colour (may be called 48 bit colour), and the Adobe RGB colour space. make the changes in that order, or you’ll degrade the colour!
2. If its a raw file, it may need a slight sharpening, as the demosaicing generates a rather soft image. Your raw convertor may already do this for you. You don’t want to get it fully sharpened for printing yet … another sharpening will be applied immediately before printing. If its a jpeg you don’t want to sharpen here.
3. Overall noise reduction. I’m putting this here, because noise may get modified in later steps, making it harder to remove. In practice, I usually use ISO 200 so I don’t have much of a noise issue to deal with anyway. Any comments from people using high ISO settings welcome.
4. if you have a lens prone to generating chromatic aberration (like my old, cheap 18-35mm full frame Sigma) fix it now, if your application can do it. (note – if you can, do this after the initial noise reduction, not before). If you don’t do it now it’ll cause subtle problems with conversion to monochrome and final sharpening, and I’ve also found that chromatic aberration can be amplified by HDR processing.

manipulate

Crop, dodge, burn, clone, blur, manipulate colour, contrast, brightness, convert to monochrome etc. Anything except resize/resample. You’re on your own here!

output

Save file. You’ve now got the image you want! (Note you haven’t done any final sharpening – that’s deliberate – final sharpening depends on what you are outputting for, so you need a finished image that isn’t sharpened.)

If printing, change the output dimensions to what you want, but don’t change the number of pixels in the image (in Photoshop, deselect resample image). You’ll have noticed that I haven’t said to resize anywhere else either – resizing either invents or destroys pixels so you don’t want to it more than once!

Select the correct profile for the paper and ink in your application, and set the correct paper type and print quality for the profile on the printer driver and tell the printer driver that the application is managing colour (select colour management: no colour management on Epson printers).

Now resize/resample changing the pixels per inch but leaving the image size in inches the same. How many pixels per inch depends on the printer you are using. If the printer outputs 600 or 1200 dots per inch (note a dot is not the same as a pixel, its a dot of ink), then 300 pixels per inch is a good choice. (This covers most Canon or HP printers, I think). If the printer outputs 720, 1440 or 2880 dots per inch (most Epson printers) 240 or 360 pixels per inch is a good choice … 300 is not despite it being often stated as the standard print resolution.

Finally, resharpen carefully (Lightroom’s print module will do both the resize and sharpen for you as part of the printing process. Photoshop CS3 doesn’t do either so you have to do them manually.)

(I cheat … I use an application called Qimage with an unsharpened, unresized output image and leave it to work out the optimum resolution and sharpening to apply, and it does an excellent job.

I bought this when I was using Photoshop 5, which didn’t really understand how to do any sensible resizing and didn’t even know how to do basic bicubic resizing … this is the time when advice for resizing in Photoshop started to be to resize in 10% increments … it did do a better job then – its rubbish advice now. Even then, better advice was to use another tool for resizing and sharpening – there were free tools that already provided bicubic resizing (eg irfanview), while Qimage provided layout and intelligent resizing and sharpening for a relatively low price.)

edited for minor typos