Lagoon and Trifid SHO Process and Print

本站添加: 2026-05-04

[00:00:00]Hi, this is Craig Stocks here at Utah Desert Remote Observatories. You can find us online at utahdesertremote.com.

[00:00:06]And today's video's going to be a little bit different. I'm going to be working with some data that was captured by one of our clients at the observatory, and he's fairly new to astrophotography, although he's pretty experienced with photography in general.

[00:00:21]And he's captured a lot of data of the Lagoon and Trifid with his setup. It's an UltraCat 108 and an ASI 2600 mm duo, although he's running it unguided.

[00:00:33]He looks like he's got like 31 hours of data here of SHO and RGB data.

[00:00:39]So, he wants me to process this for him and then we're also going to make a 20 by 30-in print once it's done. So, I've already done some processing and I'm not entirely happy with the results, so I'm going to start from scratch and we're going to walk through the processing in PixInsight and Photoshop using Pi Imaging Studio.

[00:01:09]>> [music] >> So, I'm actually going to start in PixInsight and we'll start by going to Pi Imaging Studio, which is under Pi Imaging Studio and Pi Imaging.

[00:01:24]And that brings up this dialog box and now I'll warn you I'm using a beta version of 2.1, so there are a couple of differences from the current version.

[00:01:35]But, the basic process is still the same. You select your input files, you do a quick filter check, you press start, and it does all of the PixInsight processing for you and creates files ready for Photoshop. So, I'll add the folder that contains his data. So, I'll just click on add folders.

[00:01:53]And I need to navigate to the folder that has his files in it.

[00:02:00]And it's the Lagoon and Trifid. So, just click select folder.

[00:02:04]And it found 275 files.

[00:02:08]Now, I want to load the calibration files also. So, I I keep folders of master calibration files. So, I'll just go to add folders and I'll just navigate to my folder on the It's actually on the D drive under astro calibration masters and there's his calibration masters. So, those are loaded now. And it notice it picked up the object name and it recognizes the name and knows where they are, so it can use that for plate solving if it needs to.

[00:02:42]I'll do a quick filter check. And one of the things I'll warn you with this beta version is it is a little too sensitive in picking up mosaics, so it may think this is a mosaic and it'll ask me if it is or not. If it If it does, I'll just tell it no. Yeah, see it.

[00:02:58]It's thinking maybe it's a mosaic. I'm going to say no, it's not a mosaic and now we'll just go on with normal processing.

[00:03:05]Here we can see the filters, blue, green, hydrogen. If you're curious, here's the number of frames of each one.

[00:03:12]Total of 275 lights, a master bias, four master darks, and eight master flats.

[00:03:18]Just click apply and close.

[00:03:21]And tells me that it's ready for plate solving.

[00:03:24]And at this point now I just press start and go off and get a cup of coffee while it does the the churning and chugging and creates the output files. Now, I've already run this, so I'm going to skip this part and we'll jump into Photoshop and see the results.

[00:03:40]So, I'll just cancel. We'll go to Photoshop. And I'm just going to ignore this version that I have started and I'm going to go to Astro Magic, which is included with Pi Imaging Studio. And from the import tab, I'll choose import folder.

[00:03:58]And now I just need to go to my shared drive, which is actually my T drive in my swap files.

[00:04:05]And we should find the Lagoon and Trifid right there.

[00:04:11]Click select folder.

[00:04:13]And now Astro Magic is going to load all of the data that came out of Pi Imaging Studio processing in PixInsight, organize everything into layers and layer folders and so forth, so that it's ready for basic editing.

[00:04:29]So, we'll just give this a minute to load.

[00:04:33]So, this is done loading and some of the images when you first load them in Photoshop look great because this is an SHO image and hydrogen is usually very dominant in the images, they tend to come out very green looking.

[00:04:47]Um that's okay, we're going to fix all this in Photoshop when we work on the color mapping.

[00:04:53]To start with, I'm just going to close the Astro Magic window for now because what we're going to be doing is mostly just plain Photoshop working with the the data that it set up for us.

[00:05:03]So, let me expand the layers palette here, so we can see a little bit better what's going on.

[00:05:10]And we can see there's a lot of layer groups and they're always going to be structured the same way. At the very top is the metadata and that's right here and this was created and picked up automatically by Pi Imaging when it did the integration. So, it tells me again the number of frames and the amount of time for each filter, total of 31 hours and 50 minutes, 248 frames, the camera, the focal length, and so forth.

[00:05:39]So, it picks all that up automatically.

[00:05:42]That's in a layer group. I can turn that off if I don't want to see it for now.

[00:05:47]And if I want to edit that for some reason, this is just a plain text layer, I can edit that at any time.

[00:05:54]The annotations are next and this is a layer group with three separate things.

[00:06:01]There's the star census overlay, which is down here in the lower left-hand corner and just tells us a little bit about what's in the image. Next is the sky map overlay, which is in the lower right. And then lastly is the overall annotation with the grids and the names and so forth. And again, I'm going to turn this off for now.

[00:06:23]Stars is next. And because we have a combination of narrow band and RGB stars, you'll notice there are actually three stars layers.

[00:06:33]The one on top is always going to be either RGB stars if there is RGB or HOO stars if there is no RGB because those would tend to have the best color.

[00:06:46]By default, because this has RGB plus narrow band, it puts the RGB layer on top and notice it's in color blending mode.

[00:06:55]That means we're taking the color of the stars from the RGB stars that were color calibrated. But, we're getting the size from the S8. Right now, the SHO stars is below. So, if I turn off the RGB stars, these are the SHO stars. These are usually the least useful.

[00:07:16]Um typically I In fact, I could just delete this layer and I wouldn't miss it. I'll just turn it off for now.

[00:07:22]Next, we have the HOO stars, which HOO stars tend to come out with very similar color to RGB.

[00:07:32]So, this is the This is the HOO stars by themselves.

[00:07:38]This is the RGB stars by themselves.

[00:07:41]And then when I turn the HOO, now we see the color of the RGB with the size, the smaller size of the HOO stars. Um I'll just leave this for now and turn off the entire stars layer group.

[00:07:55]Next is a set of global adjustments.

[00:07:58]It's not doing anything right now, but I'll just go ahead and turn that off.

[00:08:02]Now, we have our three narrow band layers, hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur.

[00:08:07]And they're By default, they use the SHO color palette, so hydrogen is color mapped to green, oxygen blue, and sulfur to red.

[00:08:17]And then below that, we have what I kind of think of as bonus layers. And they're by default, they're turned off.

[00:08:24]Um let's just look at them one at a time. Here we have the RGB layer group.

[00:08:29]And in this image, we're probably going to use quite a bit of this because we have a lot of good reflection nebula detail in the Trifid and a lot of good detail in the Lagoon as well. So, we probably will be using this in combination with the narrow band. I'm not sure exactly how yet.

[00:08:50]And then under that, we have an HOO. So, this is just the HOO data combined.

[00:08:56]And then last is just the SHO data combined. And again, the SHO is usually not very useful, so I'll just turn that off for now.

[00:09:07]Let's start by kind of optimizing, I guess, the RGB. So, I'll turn on the RGB layer group and expand it so we can see what's inside.

[00:09:16]At the bottom of that layer group is the RGB layer itself.

[00:09:22]Above that is the endpoints that automatically set a neutral black point and I can if I want to see what that's doing, I can just turn that layer off. So, that is before setting the black points, this is after.

[00:09:37]Then there's a burn and dodge layer group, which is just blank and not doing anything.

[00:09:42]There's a levels adjustment layer that again is not doing anything. Likewise, the color balance and hue saturation.

[00:09:50]So, immediately I can see that the core is a little bit on the bright side. Um the core of the Lagoon I should say.

[00:09:59]The Trifid looks pretty good just by default. So, let's do a couple things.

[00:10:05]Let's add a Well, I'll just start with this levels adjustment layer. I'm going to wind up needing a mask, I'm pretty sure. And I'm going to try darkening the midtones by using the levels adjustment layer and I'll slide this midpoint slider to the right and that will darken the midtones and that brings some detail back into the core.

[00:10:28]I'm not too crazy about the color. It's mostly white at this point.

[00:10:32]But that's probably pretty close to a natural color.

[00:10:37]Now I want to invert this layer mask because I only want to apply this to the center.

[00:10:43]So, I'm going to click on the mask itself, which is the white box next to the icon for a levels adjustment layer.

[00:10:53]And I'll just use the keyboard shortcut control I, that would be command I on a Mac. That inverted the mask. You can see now the mask is completely black, so it's hiding everything.

[00:11:03]And I want to reveal this adjustment just here in the core. So, with white as my foreground color, I'll set my opacity to I don't know something like 50-60% and I'll paint with white right through here. So, I'll click and drag.

[00:11:22]And that did pretty good all by itself.

[00:11:27]Now, the background I probably want to brighten a little bit. So, I'm going to add another levels adjustment layer and I'm going to brighten the midtones now looking mostly at everything but the core.

[00:11:42]And if when I brighten the midtones I may have to darken the blacks a little bit.

[00:11:48]That looks pretty good other than the Trifid in the core here now got too bright. So again, I'm going to target the mask. This time I'm going to switch to black as my foreground color and I will paint that adjustment out in the core as well as on the Trifid.

[00:12:09]That's looking pretty good as a starting point now for the RGB image.

[00:12:14]So, I think I'm just going to leave this. I'll turn this off and we'll look now at the three narrow band layers. And starting out they're very green.

[00:12:25]I usually start by normalizing them one at a time.

[00:12:29]So, I'm going to turn off hydrogen and oxygen. I'll start with sulfur.

[00:12:33]And it's much easier to see what I'm doing if I turn off this hue saturation layer and that's it's this layer this hue saturation layer that's in colorize mode and it's what's assigning red to this image. The otherwise this image is just a a monochrome image.

[00:12:49]So, I'll turn off the hue saturation layer go to the levels adjustment and I want to brighten mostly the midtones.

[00:13:02]And then I'll darken the blacks a little bit to get some good contrast in the background.

[00:13:07]And again, it's made the Trifid in the core of the Lagoon too bright. So again, I'll go to the mask and I'll mask the adjustment there and also in the core of the Trifid.

[00:13:24]And probably if you look at the properties panel, you can see the properties panel will show either the mask or the level itself. If I click on the mask, it shows the mask. If I click on the icon for levels, it shows the levels. I can also choose which properties I want to see up at the top of the that properties panel.

[00:13:47]I'm going to darken the blacks, which is the black slider, just a little bit more.

[00:13:53]I always work with a black background when I'm doing astrophotography, so I have a visual reference for how black is black because I don't want to make the background completely black in any meaningful area.

[00:14:05]I'll go ahead and turn the color back on and turn the entire layer group off and we'll do the same thing with oxygen.

[00:14:11]Again, I'll turn off the hue saturation and we'll brighten the background darken the blacks a little bit and target the mask.

[00:14:29]I'll darken this a little bit over the Trifid and somewhat over the Lagoon itself.

[00:14:38]Looks like I'm going to have to do the same thing I did with the um RGB.

[00:14:44]So, I'm going to add another levels adjustment layer.

[00:14:48]And now I'm going to darken this mostly watching the core here and try to bring some detail into the core.

[00:14:59]That may be about as good as it's going to get. Now again, I'll just invert the layer mask, grab my brush make white my foreground by tapping X and paint some of this adjustment in.

[00:15:16]We'll try that for now.

[00:15:19]And turn that off, we'll go to the hydrogen and do the same thing.

[00:15:27]Brighten the midtones.

[00:15:31]Again, I'm going to have to use the mask to darken some of this.

[00:15:39]And now I'm going to have to add another levels adjustment layer and again darken the midtones to bring detail out in the core.

[00:15:49]Invert that mask and now paint some of that adjustment in with the white brush.

[00:15:56]That's probably too much up here, so I'm just going to switch to black.

[00:16:00]Make the brush a little bigger.

[00:16:03]And fine-tune that.

[00:16:05]And I want to paint some of that adjustment in here. But that's probably too much.

[00:16:14]I'm just painting out some of that adjustment.

[00:16:18]Each one of those by themselves look okay now, but until we combine them all we won't really know. So, let's turn the oxygen and sulfur back on.

[00:16:28]Still pretty green, but it looks better.

[00:16:31]Um let's boost the red a little bit more.

[00:16:36]So, I'm going to target the sulfur because that's where red lives.

[00:16:41]Boost it a little bit more.

[00:16:45]Looks better.

[00:16:48]Let's see what happens if I take the hydrogen color from green towards red.

[00:16:59]If I go completely red, then it's just red on red and I'm going to take some blue out of the oxygen. So, this is Now, that helps quite a bit.

[00:17:16]And now we'll go to the hydrogen. I'm going to darken the hydrogen down a little.

[00:17:25]Maybe boost the red a little bit more in the sulfur.

[00:17:29]And I'm just doing this visually to try to get a you know, an attractive color balance.

[00:17:37]I think I'll take the hydrogen down a little bit more in the core.

[00:17:50]And maybe overall.

[00:17:58]Starting to look better. I'm going to just darken this whole area and also the Trifid in hydrogen.

[00:18:06]And I'm going to do that with burning and dodging. So, I'm going to go to the hydrogen layer the burning and dodging layer. I've got black as my foreground and I'll go to 10% opacity by tapping the one key and I'll start with just a big brush and I'm going to paint over I'll wind up making a couple passes over the Lagoon.

[00:18:30]And we'll do the same thing with the Trifid.

[00:18:37]And you can see on this burn and dodge layer, if we look at this layer by itself, we're just painting with a low to modest opacity black and otherwise it's black. It's just a blank layer.

[00:18:54]Looks like I need to darken it a little bit with this, so I'm going to pull it down a little.

[00:19:03]That doesn't look too awful bad.

[00:19:06]Now this again, this is just the narrow band.

[00:19:09]So, let's collapse all of our layers and I did that by holding the control key or command key on a Mac. And if you have multiple layer groups open, you can just hold the command or control key and click on the little triangle and close all of the layer groups at once.

[00:19:26]Now, because of the way these layer groups are set up, they they all contribute to the complete image simultaneously.

[00:19:34]So, right now the RGB layer is turned off. If I turn it on we now see the combination of both the narrow band and RGB all at once.

[00:19:46]And let's see what happens if I turn on global adjustments and just darken the entire image.

[00:19:58]It's not bad except for the core is still much too bright.

[00:20:04]And is it too bright in the narrow band or in the RGB?

[00:20:10]I think it's the RGB pushing it too much.

[00:20:13]Now, we do want the RGB because this blue cloud around the Trifid is a reflection nebula. That's going to mostly show up in the RGB. So, I don't want to mask it out. But, I can mask out the RGB elsewhere.

[00:20:29]Even though this is on the bottom and you normally think of a mask as hiding things and letting things below be revealed, because these layer groups are all in screen blending mode, the order kind of doesn't matter other than the global adjustments.

[00:20:45]So, I can put a layer mask on the RGB layer.

[00:20:50]Target the mask, grab my brush tool, set black as my foreground, and I'll try 30% opacity and I'm just going to mask out the RGB in the center of the Lagoon.

[00:21:05]And then I'll do it again right in the core.

[00:21:10]Trying to bring in detail but still have it look bright.

[00:21:17]And that's one of the challenges is you want the areas that are supposed to be bright to be bright, but you still need to manage that dynamic range. Now, I'm going to do the same thing over the Trifid, but I'm going to mostly focus on the the bulb part and leave the blue part pretty bright.

[00:21:39]That's starting to look pretty decent, I think.

[00:21:44]I think the overall balance is pretty good. It's still a little on the bright side, but now I'm going to go to the global adjustments and we'll darken it a little bit more.

[00:21:57]And then I'm going to pull back some of the blacks. So, if I want to make the blacks darker, I would move the upper slider.

[00:22:06]But, there's no way to move this upper slider to the left to make the blacks lighter. That's what this lower slider does. If I move it to the right, now I'm putting some brightness back into the blacks.

[00:22:19]And that's getting to have a a fairly good balance overall.

[00:22:24]Now, I might go to the color balance and experiment with do I want to make it more, actually, a little bit less red.

[00:22:34]A little magenta.

[00:22:39]I kind of like a little blue in there, although the background is getting pretty blue.

[00:22:46]So, in my color balance, I'm going to target the shadows.

[00:22:50]And I'm going to put red and yellow into the shadows.

[00:22:58]And that helps to neutralize things and provides a good color contrast throughout.

[00:23:05]Now, if I want to do some some more burning and dodging, I'm going to come to my burning and dodging global layer. Again, I'm going to grab my brush tool. I'm going to go to 10% opacity.

[00:23:17]Make the brush real big.

[00:23:19]And I'm going to experiment with brightening some of these areas to bring out a little bit more of the detail.

[00:23:32]So, brightening some areas, darkening other areas.

[00:23:45]I'm probably going to rotate this image 90°.

[00:23:54]Bringing out a little bit more of the red up here.

[00:24:00]So, let's rotate the entire image 90° counterclockwise. So, I'll go to image, image rotation, 90° counterclockwise.

[00:24:11]And because it's got to rotate everything, sometimes this takes a minute.

[00:24:15]Now, if I turn the metadata back on, you can see that it is now in the wrong direction. So, I'm going to target the metadata and I want to rotate just the metadata. So, I'm going to open free transform with control T.

[00:24:30]And then I'll just right-click and choose rotate 90° clockwise.

[00:24:35]And I'll move it back up to the top.

[00:24:38]And now we have our metadata restored.

[00:24:42]Let's see what the stars look like. If I turn off I'll turn off the metadata, turn on the stars.

[00:24:49]Lots of stars.

[00:24:50]More than I want.

[00:24:52]So, I'm going to open the stars layer group and I'm going to do a couple things here. First, I'm going to darken the stars. I'll darken the black point.

[00:25:01]And that cleans up some of the noise between the stars and then I'll darken the midpoint a little bit and that'll make them a little darker overall.

[00:25:10]Now, I'm going to use one of the tools in AstroMagic. And to start with, I'm going to just move the HOO layer up. So, I'm just ignoring this SHO stars.

[00:25:21]And I'm going to select the HOO, the RGB and the levels, all three.

[00:25:26]And I want to apply an enhance tool to this. So, I'm going to go to AstroMagic, enhance, and enhance stars.

[00:25:34]And this does a couple things. It knocks out the little stars and then it makes the remaining stars a little bit more prominent. Now, sometimes it makes them too prominent.

[00:25:44]We'll see how this looks.

[00:25:50]I I like that better overall. I think if you look at the structure, what it did, it converted those three layers to a smart filter and that's why I selected all three of those before I applied the filter because I wanted all three of those encapsulated into this one smart object.

[00:26:09]The Gaussian blur layer normally works in screen blending mode.

[00:26:14]In this case, I think it would work better in normal blending mode. So, to get to it, there's a little adjustment icon over to the right of any of the smart filters.

[00:26:24]If I double-click on that, it will open the blending options for the smart filters.

[00:26:30]And I'm going to change this from screen to normal and opacity to 100%.

[00:26:40]And I feel like that looks better.

[00:26:45]So, at this point now, I would probably continue with global adjustments.

[00:26:53]I think I can brighten [clears throat] a little bit.

[00:27:00]That feels like a fairly decent balance.

[00:27:03]Um, above the levels, there's a color balance where we made some some overall color changes.

[00:27:11]Then there's a hue saturation and it's sometimes I'll increase the overall saturation because this is going to be printed. You tend to lose some saturation when you print.

[00:27:23]My reds are looking a little bit magenta. So, I'm going to target just the reds and put a little bit of a little bit more yellow into the reds.

[00:27:39]Overall, that looks pretty good.

[00:27:42]This last color fill typically shouldn't do anything. All that's doing is providing a kind of a floor background level Os.

[00:27:52]Very dark but not black. If I turn it off and on, normally you shouldn't see much if any difference anywhere other than in areas that don't really matter. If you if you're not seeing any difference, then maybe your blacks should be a little blacker.

[00:28:11]Let's try that.

[00:28:15]Now, above the color fill, I'm going to add possibly two more adjustment layers.

[00:28:19]I'm going to add a brightness contrast and just boost some global contrast.

[00:28:27]And this will let me adjust global brightness a little bit if if I need to.

[00:28:32]And then the last one I'm going to add, and I always add this last, is clarity and dehaze. And this is a new adjustment layer just with the latest versions of Photoshop. But, this lets me add some clarity, which is a little bit of local contrast.

[00:28:50]Um, I'm going to come back to my burning and dodging and just darken the core a little bit.

[00:29:03]Still a little bright.

[00:29:09]So, it looks like I need to darken it in the RGB in the SHO a little bit.

[00:29:15]So, let's go to the hydrogen.

[00:29:21]Darken it a little bit and I'll go to the sulfur.

[00:29:25]Burn and dodge and darken a little bit there as well. And that kind of retains that blue from the oxygen.

[00:29:35]And if I want to fine-tune the color of the oxygen, remember we shifted it from blue towards cyan.

[00:29:41]This is a good time to come back and just, you know, kind of fine-tune some of these colors. And the beauty of Photoshop is I'm seeing the effect live with every other adjustment layer still intact.

[00:29:55]So, this is an SHO image with sulfur red hydrogen yellow and oxygen cyan.

[00:30:04]Um, looks like I could use a little bit more of the blue up here. to go to this see what does this do?

[00:30:21]Yeah, I'm going to make this a little bit more visible from the RGB by painting with white on this mask.

[00:30:35]And up.

[00:30:42]Overall, I feel like that's pretty good.

[00:30:44]Uh, I'm I'm sure I will make some more changes.

[00:30:49]Uh, let's see if we can I'm going to go into my global adjustments above the burn and dodge, but below my main layers adjustment.

[00:31:08]And I'm going to do another levels adjustment looking just at the core of the Lagoon.

[00:31:13]So, I'm going to darken that down a little.

[00:31:20]Something like this.

[00:31:22]And like we did before, I'm going to invert this.

[00:31:25]And then paint with white at uh somewhat low opacity.

[00:31:33]I just want to make sure we have detail throughout that core.

[00:31:37]And it could be the Yeah, the clarity is not really changing it.

[00:31:47]Contrast is a little too strong in the core. So, I'm going to go to my brightness and contrast and paint with black at a fairly high opacity.

[00:31:57]And mask the contrast in that area. So, we we've done a lot of things to this image. Uh, I'm going to see how this looks cropped.

[00:32:08]So, I'm going to go to the crop tool.

[00:32:10]And the the bad part about Photoshop is the tools are just kind of scattered all over. Some are attached to the layers palette, some are in the adjustment layers, some you get from the menu, others are tools over on the right-hand side. Uh, the crop is a tool in the tools palette.

[00:32:29]And I want to set this to a 20 by 30 ratio.

[00:32:36]So, if he's wanting a 20 by 30 print, this is what that ratio would look like.

[00:32:41]And I want to crop out this bright area at the bottom.

[00:32:46]And since we have a ratio set, it's maintaining that aspect ratio.

[00:32:53]And since we've cropped in a little, we could I think I'm just going to leave this like this for now, because I also need to share this with the client before I make a print.

[00:33:07]Uh, most likely I will save this. I'll come back and look at it again.

[00:33:12]Uh, I can see right now I as I look at the blue up here, I feel like it's got too much magenta in it.

[00:33:19]So, I'm probably going to come to the hue saturation. Um, maybe target the blues, and I might even want to pick up just this color. So, I'll grab the eyedropper from the hue saturation and click on that color.

[00:33:34]So, now it has picked just that color.

[00:33:37]And that's fixing taking some of the magenta out of that blue. So, and that looks better.

[00:33:48]Uh, let's see.

[00:33:50]>> [clears throat] >> Yeah, overall that looks better.

[00:33:53]I'm going to save this for now. That looks way too dark, doesn't it?

[00:34:04]I'm going to save this for now. I'm sure when I come back and look at it later, I'll see other things I want to change.

[00:34:09]Uh, I feel like I've made the core too dark here.

[00:34:13]Uh, so I'll be making some adjustments to that. And I can always use the global burning and dodging to start making finer adjustments.

[00:34:26]Uh, you know, one one technique is to darken areas that are too bright. Uh, but then you can also selectively brighten and darken areas if you some areas have gotten too dark.

[00:34:40]Uh, just to bring out the balance overall.

[00:34:46]So, I hope you found this useful. It was um the editing process was very non-linear as I kind of rattled around here, and that's really pretty typical. Um, most of the videos that I do, I have already edited the image, so I kind of know where I'm going.

[00:35:00]Uh, this one I kind of stumbled along.

[00:35:03]Uh, I may change this quite a bit before we make the final print.

[00:35:06]Uh, but I will try to add the the final image and the printing process to this video. So, you may not see this video until I get all of that done. Well, now it's the next day, and I've had a chance to review the image with the customer, and he likes the the vertical orientation. And he's also elected to keep the um metadata at the lower left-hand, and we have it at a very low opacity, so it's somewhat faded. It'll be legible on the print, but it won't really stand out. So, we're going to make a 20 by 30-in print of this image.

[00:35:41]And this is something I don't think I've ever done on uh one of these videos. So, I'm printing from Photoshop, and to do that, I'm going to go to file, print, and this will bring up the print settings dialogue. And there's a couple things that you need to keep in mind. You have the the main thing is color management.

[00:36:03]You can have either the printer manage the color or Photoshop manage the color, but you absolutely do not want both of them trying to manage the color. That will usually lead to some very weird results. I pretty much always have Photoshop manage the color, and that just makes it easy, because I always do it the same way.

[00:36:22]So, I need to go first to the print settings dialogue.

[00:36:26]And we're printing this on a Epson Stylus Pro 9900, so this is a 44-in wide printer, and I have 24-in wide paper loaded into it. Uh, I've already saved a um Epson Premium Luster profile, uh but I do need to change the paper size. So, I'll go to user defined.

[00:36:46]I've chosen roll paper here. And notice under the mode, I have quality, custom, and then off, which is no color adjustment. So, the printer is not going to try to make any color changes. I'll go to the user defined options and switch to inches. I have 24-in paper.

[00:37:07]And this is going to be 20 by 30, so the image needs to be at least 30-in tall. I usually give it just a little extra breathing room, so I'll go 31-in.

[00:37:18]And the printer will actually add a little bit more than that.

[00:37:22]And now okay, and this will bring up the preview window.

[00:37:26]I need to rotate the print, and I can do that with the layout button.

[00:37:32]So, now we have it shown the way we want it printed.

[00:37:35]And the other important part, since the we want Photoshop to manage the color, I've chosen under color handling uh Photoshop manages color.

[00:37:45]And seeing a little bit of a document profile says untagged, and I want to change that before I print this.

[00:37:55]So, I'm going to go ahead and finish this dialogue. We have the premium luster photo paper printer profile chosen. Uh, relative color metric as the rendering intent.

[00:38:07]Black point compensation is checked. And then for scale, I'm printing this at 100%, and I've already sized it in Photoshop.

[00:38:15]Uh, I'm going to click done.

[00:38:18]And I want to go to edit, convert to profile, and I'm going to convert this to sRGB, which is really what it is, even though it's untagged, but I want to make sure that the printer knows that or that Photoshop knows the color profile that we're printing.

[00:38:39]Now, sRGB is a smaller color space than the printer's capable of, so I don't expect to have any uh color gamut issues. If you want to check that, you can soft proof under view, proof setup, and I can choose the Epson Premium Luster.

[00:38:57]And if I choose um under view, um proof colors, that will show uh the image, you know, kind of soft proofing. I can also turn on gamut warning, and anything that is out of gamut will be shown as gray.

[00:39:19]Uh, there's nothing that's shown out of gamut. So, I'm going to go ahead and turn off gamut and color proofing.

[00:39:26]Now, we'll go back.

[00:39:27]This is just making sure that the the Photoshop knows what we're trying to accomplish with the colors.

[00:39:35]I'm going to come back to the print dialogue, and it should still have those settings. So, there's the 20 by 30 print at 100%.

[00:39:43]At this point, all I have to do is click on print.

[00:39:47]And Photoshop will now go through the process of converting the data that it sends to the printer from an sRGB RGB image to CMYK for the printer. And it'll actually adjust it for all of the different inks. Uh the printer actually has, I think, 12 12 different inks. Um And so, it's a a very high color gamut printer. You can probably hear the printer starting to run over my shoulder here. I'll try to get some um footage of the printer printing. And then, when it's done, we'll go in the studio and take a look at the finished print.

[00:40:34]Here we can see the print coming out of the printer.

[00:40:40]Well, I've removed the print from the printer. Uh you can see it here. It's 20 in by 30 in, so on 24-in wide paper. So, the print itself is probably about 32 33 in tall. Uh looks like it has good detail, good color. Uh I haven't had a chance to go over real closely, but I certainly will.

[00:40:59]At this point, I'm just going to let it dry down a little bit, even though the ink is dry when it comes out of the printer. Uh you want it to dry, you know, you know, for probably 15 to 30 minutes at least uh to see what it's really going to look like when it fully dries down.

[00:41:15]Uh then, I'll deliver it to the customer, and he'll take care of framing.

[00:41:19]Hope you found this useful. If you have any questions, drop those in the comments down below.

[00:41:23]And as always, I hope you have a great day today and an even better night tonight under a clear, dark sky. Thanks.

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