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This is the final installment in my 6 part series on Digital Photography Workflow for the Beginner.  In this lesson, I’m going to share my preferred workflow for easily preparing photos to make quality prints.

In the previous segment I reviewed my approach to creating a photo web page to share with friends and family.  In this lesson I also prefer to use Breezebrowser Pro (BP), and in many ways the two lessons are quite similar.

Note that my interest here is to present a simple method by which digital photos can be enhanced for the purposes of creating a quality print.  If one so desires, there is a long list of “post-processing” techniques that can be applied in the “digital darkroom”.  In the interest of keeping this simple, the process I describe here will do only two things:

1. Balance the color in the image
2. Apply some moderate sharpening

These two elements will provide a dramatically improved print than if an image was otherwise left unaltered.

Another common, and perhaps, important basic editing technique is cropping.  Cropping the photo simply selects an image area that one wishes to print, and discards the remainder.  BP does not provide a means to visually crop the image, however, most online photo processing companies allow the user to crop the photo prior to finalizing the order. 

Recall from the prior lesson the steps taken to select photos within the BP application.  Instead of creating a web page with the selected photos, we will prepare them to be printed by selecting “Tools” from the menu bar, and then selecting “Proofs…”.  The following is a snapshot of the menu.  (Click to enlarge.)

When you select “Proofs…”, you will launch a dialog box that looks like this:

Within this window you need only pay attention to 4 items.  Referring to the above attachment, check the “Auto level” box (leave the default settings of 0.05% black and white points alone), and check the “Sharpen Image” box (method “HQ style”, default 75%).  Now ensure your output settings  are set to “JPEG”, Quality = 100%.  Click “Proof Selected” to the folder you specify and you’re finished!

Once you’ve successfully created your proofs you can upload them to your preferred online photo processor for printing by navigating to the folder you created and selecting the images.  That’s it!

Please share your respective tips for this process.  As I’ve emphasized throughout this series, there are many methodologies when it comes to working with digital photos on the computer.  I’ve attempted to share my approach in the hope that it will simplify the process for others.

chris@clawblog.com

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