Color profile: Generic CMYK printer profile Composite Default screen
DigPhoto / Shoot Like a Pro! Digital Photography/ King/ 2949-7 / Chapter 9
CHAPTER 9: Becoming a Master Printer
reconfigured the ink set for the 2200P, sacrificing some life expectancy for better color reproduction. Print life on the 2200P is estimated at 44 years on Epson’s glossy media. Let me offer a few additional points that may help you sort out the archival issue: • If you’re not sure what to expect from your printer or paper, point your web
browser to the site of the leading authority on print life, Wilhelm Research (www.wilhelm-research.com). Test results for popular printers, papers, and inks are posted on the site. • Most people think that light exposure is the main cause of print degradation,
but pollution, heat, and humidity are equally destructive, if not more so. You can extend print life by framing your pictures under glass and not displaying them for long periods of time in direct sunlight. Or store them in archival albums, in a dry, clean, cool environment. (These precautions apply to your traditional film photos as well.) • Although plenty of testing is being done by Wilhelm Research and others, no one
can really say for sure how long any digital print will last. We just haven’t been printing digital images long enough to know whether the aging factors introduced in laboratory tests will hold true in real life. The rapid pace at which manufacturers develop new technologies makes testing even more difficult—by the time researchers devise a set of testing protocols for a particular printing technology, that technology has been replaced by something newer and better. • Finally, remember that as long as you retain your digital original, you can always
make a new print if the old one starts to look worse for wear. This safety net doesn’t help for prints you plan to sell, but for cherished family memories, you can rest easy as long as you take care of your image files.
Chapter 1 offers tips for archiving your original image files.
Preparing Your Picture for Printing When you print a document from a word processor, you don’t need to do any preparatory work—you just click the Print button and wait for the printer to do its thing. Printing a digital photo, however, requires a bit more input on your part. Before printing your picture, you need to use your photo software to specify two key values: • The print size. • How many pixels you want to pack into each linear inch of that print. This value
is the output resolution and is measured in pixels per inch (ppi).
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