Producing Better Prints

It’s not often I wholeheartedly endorse a product or course, but I’m going to put a stake in the sand here and say you need to buy this latest offering from Sean Bagshaw and Zack Schnepf called Producing Better Prints.  It is an in-depth video course walking you through every step of the print process so you can have confidence that your prints will match what you see on your monitor. For many folks, printing is a “dark art” surrounded by a lot of mystic and confusing terminology and in this video series Sean and Zack de-mystify the entire process, using language that everyone can understand.

Sean Bagshaw

The Producing Better Prints course has 32 chapters and its over 4 hours long!!!   It starts at the beginning of the process with monitor calibration.  They’ll demonstrate how to properly calibrate a monitor while explaining why this is a critical step.  From there they dive in to color spaces and bit depths to explain what the best color spaces are for printing and why.  Then they move to software settings, printer types and media types.  From there, the meat of the course really takes off, jumping in to the concept of Soft Proofing with ICC profiles and how best to do this and more importantly why to do it. They cover this topic in both Lightroom and Photoshop.

From there, they go in-depth to print sizing and print sharpening and cover this in Lightroom, Photoshop and Topaz Gigapixel AI and Topaz Sharpen AI.

Zack Schnepf

They walk you through the actual printing process from Lightroom and Photoshop, plus what you can do to fix dark prints.

What I really appreciate about this series is that they even discuss the question of if you should make the leap and own a printer, discussing the pros, cons and cost.  Because for some folks, it just doesn’t make sense to print on their own, instead what is best is to trust a lab to do your printing.  They discuss the best ways to work with photo labs to help you get the best prints possible.   They included a couple of bonus videos with tips and tricks not covered in the full course, PLUS, they include a bunch of test images for you to follow along with them with the same images.

I’ve done a fair amount of printing myself and I can say that I learned ALOT from watching this.  There were several things I didn’t know that have been extremely helpful for me in producing better prints.  Printing can be daunting, and it is a whole new learning curve, but many photogs feel it is the ultimate expression of an image.  Seeing an image on screen is one thing, but seeing it in print brings it to a whole new experience level.  Reflected light on the print (versus backlit on the monitor), a tactile sheet of paper, something you can hang on your wall…it is so rewarding to see one of your images in print. As Sean explains in our podcast, printing is like the third leg of the photographic art stool.  One leg is mastering the capture of the image. The second leg of the stool is mastering the development of the image and then finally, the third leg is the printing of the image.  We are inundated with information about the first two legs, but honestly, there isn’t a lot of good information about the third leg and that’s where Zack and Sean come in.

Jack Graham and I were pleased to host Zack and Sean on our podcast We Talk Photo where we discuss why they did this series, what’s in it and who it is targeted towards.  Click the image below to go listen to the podcast (better yet, subscribe and get all our episodes 🙂

A big disclaimer here….I am not affiliated with Sean or Zack (other than friends) and am not making any money from this series.  I was just so impressed with the incredible amount of information, quality, price and fantastic value of this series, I couldn’t help but to give a big shout out.  If you’ve ever watched any of Seans YouTube videos, or taken a workshop from Zack or Sean, you know these guys have an incredible attention to details and believe in over-delivering in whatever they do.

Listen to the podcast with Sean and Zack by clicking on the image below!

To get this course, you can purchase it from Sean or Zacks website.  It’s an easy process to purchase it and get an immediate download to start watching the videos.

Seans Site: https://www.outdoorexposurephoto.com/video-tutorials/video-tutorials/

Zacks Site: https://www.zschnepf.com/Other/Videos2

If you have any interest in printing yourself, this is your course!  And if you don’t, you still need to have some knowledge of calibration, color spaces and preparing a file for a print lab, so again, this course is for you.