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Author Topic: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS  (Read 25274 times)

vjbelle

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Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« on: November 05, 2010, 01:35:31 pm »

Is there any advantage to printing in Lightroom over CS5?  I would think that the print engines would be identical - are they? 

Thanks for any replies.....
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Jeremy Roussak

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #1 on: November 05, 2010, 02:08:24 pm »

Is there any advantage to printing in Lightroom over CS5?  I would think that the print engines would be identical - are they? 

Thanks for any replies.....
LR will automatically apply such output sharpening as is appropriate for the paper type (matt/glossy) and size of the print. CS5 won't. There may be other differences but that is, I believe, by far the most important.

Jeremy
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GCraybas

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #2 on: November 05, 2010, 03:25:17 pm »

A follow up to the original question.  What is the benefit of image resizing(larger) with resampling in photoshop than creating a larger cell size and increasing the DPI in LR3 if the file is to be printed just out of LR3.  Is there a significant improvement in image quality if this is done in CS5, if so then what about the need for fractal program.  I am taking my images with a D3x and making prints up to 20x30 on Epson 7900?
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Eric Myrvaagnes

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #3 on: November 05, 2010, 03:26:49 pm »

LR will automatically apply such output sharpening as is appropriate for the paper type (matt/glossy) and size of the print. CS5 won't. There may be other differences but that is, I believe, by far the most important.

Jeremy
One more advantage to LR is the fact that you can define presets for specific papers and sizes and count on LR doing the right thing every time. In CS5 I always found that in about one print out of every ten I forgot to specify one little thing in either the printer driver or the Photoshop panel and I screwed something up and had to reprint. Since recently switching to LR for all printing I have saved lots of ink and paper just from the use of the presets alone.

Eric
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NikoJorj

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #4 on: November 06, 2010, 06:29:16 am »

Add to those output sharpening and resizing, and presets that include driver settings, some ability to do basic layouts (still limited though) in a simpler way than in PS.
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Nicolas from Grenoble
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chez

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #5 on: November 07, 2010, 09:35:26 am »

Biggest drawback of printing from light room is the lack of soft proofing in light room. Have to jump into ps to soft proof so I print from it as well.
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digitaldog

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #6 on: November 07, 2010, 12:15:17 pm »

Biggest drawback of printing from light room is the lack of soft proofing in light room. Have to jump into ps to soft proof so I print from it as well.

Another minor issue in LR (which I hope gets attention next version). Its darn difficult to print a document at 100% scale. The template has to be exactly configured to do this. So for those of us having to print, say a target to build a profile, where the patches have to be an exact size, its super easy in Photoshop’s Print dialog, just ensure the 100% check box is on, no scaling. Not so easy in LR. But otherwise, I love the LR print module.
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NikoJorj

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #7 on: November 07, 2010, 01:16:31 pm »

Another minor issue in LR (which I hope gets attention next version).
Should be resolved before that, when Adobe unleashes its target printing app... Seems like we had never been so close to that moment as now.  ;)
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digitaldog

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #8 on: November 07, 2010, 01:19:23 pm »

Should be resolved before that, when Adobe unleashes its target printing app... Seems like we had never been so close to that moment as now.  ;)

True, but there still should be an easy way to print any document out at 100% in the Print Module. A simple check box would do the trick for existing rendered (and thus doc’s with a “size” specified) images.
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PeterAit

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #9 on: November 07, 2010, 01:48:55 pm »

Is it possible to define a LR present that will adjust roll paper length to fit the image? I almost always print with the short dimension of the image at 15" (because I use 16" roll paper and want a 1/2" white border). But the long dimension of my images varies depending on the camera and cropping. I'd love a preset that looks at the image size and automatically cuts the roll paper 1" longer than the image's long dimension and prints the image centered.
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NikoJorj

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #10 on: November 07, 2010, 03:36:36 pm »

Is it possible to define a LR preset that will adjust roll paper length to fit the image?
Sounds neat, but... Such an automation (plugin rather than preset?) would have to talk with the driver to set the page length (which has to be set anyway). Not that simple I'd guess.

Nevertheless, that goes without saying it would be warmly welcome!
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Bob Smith

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #11 on: November 07, 2010, 09:02:30 pm »

Its darn difficult to print a document at 100% scale.

That's not a minor issue to me.  I'm glad to see someone else point it out.  I love printing out of Lightroom except for this glitch.  I frequently want to print images that have been sized precisely to odd sizes.  I would love to be able to do it in Lightroom without having to spend considerable time building a precise custom template for each one.  Just as there is a "zoom to fit" check box, there needs to be a "Leave this already sized image alone PLEASE!" check box.  Such an option would also make it easy to print test sections of large images to smaller template.  All of these things are dead simple in Photoshop.

I'm guessing that part of the problem is that Lightroom is designed primarily to work with various raw format files.  Such a file doesn't have a "size" until its rendered.  I'm sure it would complicate the print interface a bit to designate different handling for rendered files (tiff, jpeg) versus raw (DNG, CR2, NEF etc).

Bob Smith
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PeterAit

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #12 on: November 08, 2010, 04:32:59 pm »

As much as I love LightRoom, I have found its printing module to be pretty worthless. It seems to be designed for professional wedding photographers and the like who need to crank out large, repetitive print jobs. Nothing wrong with that, but it is not what I need. I may make only 1 or 2 prints a week, but they are precisely crafted and I need complete control over everything. LR does not provide this, so I print from Photoshop. I am not in such a rush that the extra 30 or 60 seconds required to set print options in PS is a problem.
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Schewe

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #13 on: November 08, 2010, 05:13:01 pm »

It seems to be designed for professional wedding photographers and the like who need to crank out large, repetitive print jobs.

No actually...it was designed for me. I also don't do tons of volumes of prints but what I do demand is absolute consistency and repeatability as well as an efficient workflow...so what exactly do you try to control that Lightroom limits you? The only limit I see is a slight difficulty in printing out images at exactly 100% but since I rarely worry about that anymore as I no longer have to build an image iteration for each and every print size I make (another benefit of LR printing) I really don't care about specific sizes at specific resolutions since the output sharpening can be applied automatically at the final resolution leaving only the actual print size to deal with.

I would suggest that if you have problems using the Lightroom Print module for high quality fine art printing, maybe you should learn how to use it.
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PeterAit

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #14 on: November 08, 2010, 05:55:26 pm »

LR does not let me control the output sharpening. Its output sharpening is quite good, but I would rather decide this myself than have some programmer do it for me.

LR makes it very difficult to control the paper and image size, particularly when using roll paper.

There's no soft-proofing (fatal!).

I think that LR is probably the best designed and executed program I have ever used, and given my 30 years of experience with computers that is saying a lot. That does not mean I will be silent about its few flaws.
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Schewe

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #15 on: November 08, 2010, 06:08:33 pm »

LR does not let me control the output sharpening. Its output sharpening is quite good, but I would rather decide this myself than have some programmer do it for me.

Some programmer? You mean me? The output sharpening is based upon (and furthers) Bruce Fraser's PhotoKit Output Sharpening...and we (PixelGenius) worked with "the programers" to get it to work really well. Can you do it better personally? Nope, I don't think so...what you can to is modify both the captuer sharpeing and creative sharpening that will impact the output sharpening but I gotta tell you that combined with the adaptive resampling and the output output sharpening I seriously doubt Photoshop is the best place to print from. Yes, I process images out and bring them into Photoshop for soft proofing but I save the file and print from Lightroom after soft proofing.

As far as difficulty controlling paper and image size, exactly what do you mean, exactly?
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digitaldog

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #16 on: November 08, 2010, 06:17:20 pm »

Yes, the lack of soft proofing is an issue but I still feel the Print module is worth the price of admission. The idea of printing one image at a time, setting everything up each time out of Photoshop is positively so 20th century. Once you setup templates, printing out of LR is wonderful. Worth a trip to Photoshop for soft proofing just to end up back in LR.'s print module.
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Bob Smith

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #17 on: November 08, 2010, 07:30:21 pm »

Yes, I mostly love the Lightoom print module.  Output sharpening and resizing algorithms work like a charm.  But the not being able to print a sized image to size is a major pain.  I do a lot of large format printing to non standard sizes where i may allow varying amounts of bleed area that will be trimmed away upon mounting.  I really don't want size altered one iota upon printing.  I have usually sized the document without altering the rez up or down so that I can allow the print module or printer driver to do that part.  I would love for Lightroom to do its thing and output to my defined size without having to reenter the parameters into a new Lightroom template all over again after I've already sized the image in Photoshop.  It wouldn't be so bad except the resulting size is often some oddball fractional inch measurements in both dimensions so simply remembering what to enter into Lightroom isn't always easy.

Give me the ability to print sized images and I'll fully sing the praises of the Lightroom print module from the rooftops.

Bob Smith
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NikoJorj

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #18 on: November 09, 2010, 04:21:13 am »

LR makes it very difficult to control the paper and image size, particularly when using roll paper.
It justs uses the driver for that (as does PS), and yes it's really not fitted at all with roll paper use, where one should just specify a roll width and let the driver find the appropriate page length depending on image size and margins.
Alas, this valley of tears ain't no perfect world.
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Nicolas from Grenoble
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PeterAit

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Re: Printing in Lightroom vs Printing in PS
« Reply #19 on: November 09, 2010, 09:41:28 am »

I am not doubting the excellence of LR's sharpening. The point I was making is that it is done automatically and I don't get any say in it. But, maybe I should play around with it some more. If it's really as good as you suggest, maybe I can relinquish control over this aspect of print making.
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