This material is intended for beginners, first time going to print your creation in minilabs. For this training program is ideally suited Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. So what we have at the entrance: Your "masterpiece", filmed in th jpg or raw. The latter is certainly preferable, since it does not involve lossy compression and stores all the information withdrawn from the ccd camera. What should be done to result obtained from a minilab to make you happy? First and foremost, need to adjust your monitor! Of course, ideally, it should be calibrated. However, calibration of monitors and printers – is a separate big topic, "hurriedly" it does not take. Therefore, restrict the setting in the first approximation. Just received from the store lcd monitor, with a probability of 90% has battened down to the sky brightness and contrast.
Brightness must be reduced so that the brightness of the white background was comparable to the brightness of a sheet of white paper with room lighting. To adjust the contrast, you can use one of the tests, which can be found on the web. Now the most difficult – need to adjust the color. With this in lcd – monitors at all the trouble. And often in settings that are more or less suitable for working with photos to work with text very uncomfortable.
But still try to find such adjustment color where the colors of the sky, green foliage and your favorite jacket will resemble the real thing. Now you're ready to actually processing the photo. You need to follow these steps: adjusting the exposure and brightness (Exposure, Brightness). Expose the level of the shadows (Blacks) and, if necessary to impose a filter to remove Recovery Peresvetov (do not overdo it, all Peresvetov not retract, and can spoil the picture) If the image seems too washed out or, conversely, too strong, try play with the contrast (Contrast). Tune the white balance on unsized monitor – exercise is pretty pointless, but if the white snow on your photo has a clear blue or green tint, you can use the tool "Dropper". Crop the (Crop) picture in accordance with the desired print size (not all fotapparatov format of the matrix corresponds exactly to the standard ratio). Save the file. Pre-need to decide on the size print, find out the real (to the nearest millimeter) size and resolution (typically 300 dpi) in your chosen minilabs. Select the menu item Export. File Type choose uncompressed tiff stamped in the properties of the required dimensions and resolution fingerprint. Warn: file size get huge! Well, that's all that remains classified or send a file to the lab, to warn that the printed "as is" and, taking the printed image, to enjoy the results.