From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

Using my customizable printer test file - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Using my customizable printer test file

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- [Instructor] I'm going to start things off by taking you on a tour of this printer test file that I've created for you in advance. And I'm providing you with this very colorful file because they want you to be able to truly test how well your printer is able to reproduce the colors that you see on screen. All right, so for starters here, I'll go up to the image menu and I'll choose the image size command. So that we can see, if I switch two inches right here, that this image measures 12 inches wide by nine inches tall, which is large enough to print on a letter-size page here in the U.S. or on an A4 page in another country. Also notice that I have the resolution values set to 360 pixels per inch, which is a great standard when printing to an Inkjet device. All right, so I'll go ahead and cancel out of there. All right, now let's take a look at these color swatches right here. And notice that, in all, we have 48 of them divided into two groups of 24, starting with these RGB primaries. And let me show you what I mean by that. Here inside the color panel, I'll click on the fly out menu icon in the top right corner and switch to RGB sliders. And as you can see, if your foreground color is black, all three of the values, red, green, and blue, are set to zero. If you want to achieve the red that we're seeing at the top of the first column, then you would crank the red value all the way up to its brightest setting of 255. If you wanted to achieve the yellow, then you would also crank the green value up to 255. And so the idea is the more of each primary light that you add to a color, the brighter it becomes. Next door, we have the same primaries, but expressed as CMYK values. And to give you a sense for what that looks like, I'll click on that fly out menu icon once again and choose CMYK sliders. And this time around, if I wanted to achieve that red, right there at the top of the column, then I would take the cyan value down to zero, I would crank the magenta value up to a hundred, I would leave the yellow value set to a hundred, and I would leave the K value, black, set to 0%. So the recipe for red is a hundred percent magenta plus a hundred percent yellow. If I want to do achieve yellow, then I would get rid of the magenta, and that's going to brighten up that color. And so in other words, CMYK is essentially the opposite of RGB. The more ink that you add, the darker the color becomes. All right, in the next column, we have the flesh tones, starting with these three cool skin tones, and next we have three warm skin tones. And then finally, we have a group of gray values, starting at white at the top and then black at the bottom. Now in this next pallet right here, we have the Macbeth colors, which may be familiar to those of you who are photographers. And so every single one of the 24 Macbeth colors is represented. Now, part of the beauty of this composition is that everything is divided into independent layers. And so notice if I press control zero, or command zero on the Mac, to zoom out, I can Alt+click on the eye in front of this colors layer, and you can see just the colorful background, or I could go ahead and turn on the model as well. So you can turn the layers on and off as you see fit, or you can take advantage of my presets. To see what they look like, go up to the window menu and choose the layer comps command to bring up the layer comps panel here. And notice if you click, not on the layer comp, but in front of it, in this little square, you'll go ahead and turn that layer comp on, and that will restore all of the layers that we saw at the outset of this movie. If you want to print the image without the Dreamstime URL, then you can switch to the next layer comp. Now notice that the swatches appear on these granite tablets. If you don't want the granite, if you find it distracting, then you can switch to the next layer comp, this guy right here, solid tablets. At which point, I've gone ahead and surrounded each one of the swatches with a double stroke, first white and then black. If you want to see just the swatches with no tablets whatsoever, then click in front of this guy, just swatches. And then finally, if you just want to see the imagery without any swatches at all, you can click in front of this final swatch, and you'll end up printing just the photographic elements of the composition. And that's how you work with my custom printer test file that I've designed to test how well your printer can reproduce the colors that you're seeing on screen.

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