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Photograph is just an image until it is printed. 

 

Yeah... Photographers needs to print their images to get them to be photographs, be them in the books, as prints in album or walls or table etc. We just need to get the images out from the digital devices to the physical world to really get the value and impact to them. 

 

So, many knows that printing is expensive, either by ordering prints or then doing prints by yourself. And all who does printing knows the basics of "soft proofing" but even that is just a trial and error method really. 

 

Adobe Lightroom (and few others) has a modern "print layout" feature where you can just select templates and place images in order and then just order print or press "print" and it comes out from the printer. But that is useful really only at the final results!

 

The Affinity Photo (and incoming Affinity Digital Asset Management) would really help many photographers by offering a real "soft proofing" method. That is the feature from the darkroom era etc, where first we did a contact sheet so we could see easily negatives later on what we had. 

  Then when we had chosen what we started to process, we needed to do a exposure test strip so we could bracket the correct exposure for the print before we start to work it.

 

And then we did these on the smaller papers that were cheaper than using a final paper size. Like if we wanted to make a 20x30" print, we didn't do these evaluation tests for such size! We used all the scrap paper we had or size that could fit our negatives (usually single sheet of 8x10" paper for contact sheet). 

 

And here is the request:

To offer to let us get this automated very easily to save money and time!

 

  1. Let us select a images we want to get printed
  2. Then let us to choose the final print size that will be the target like 30x20cm (this is crucial for sharpening, resolution, denoise evaluation)
  3. After that we select the test print size like 10x15cm. 

Now comes the easiness as well, we can select "strip" as well for the selected "test print", so the print is divided for a selected strips (like 1-5) and each strip can have a different settings (sharpening, contrast, saturation etc etc) or even files (copies of the same file of course)!

 

This would allow easily anyone to import image to Affinity Photo, process it like they consider it to be a final one. And then export it to "soft proof" persona.

  And there user selects the final print size that is the target (like I want that 30x20cm print to be final) and then selects the test print size that is the paper size that is really going to be used to produce the test prints. 

 

And then we can choose a amount of strips for a test print and select each strip and make some special adjustment to each of them. And then print that/share that out so we can see what were the real results on print in final print size look!

 

Example: Take image, adjust colors, contrast, sharpness. Then export it to "soft proof" persona and select target to be 20x30cm 300DPI print and test print a 10x15cm. Now the image gets overlay crop box that is size of 10x15cm related to the final 30x20cm 300DPI print (so 1/4 of print area) that we can move to position we want (we can have multiple of these!) and then we can select the amount of strips ie. 4. And then we can click each of the strips and edit each of the strip as individual by control values of the adjustments we did on the whole image (color adjustment, contrast and sharpness like we did above) but this is done just with +/- slider. It doesn't allow to apply a new effects but only ones we did and that matters in printing (like DPI value, colors, contrast, sharpening etc) and each strip gets easy way to set them up/down. 

  So we get ie test print size of 10x15cm with 4 slides and each strip has +20 sharpening adjustment compared to next one. So strips are

  • Original
  • +20 Sharpening
  • +40 Sharpening
  • +60 Sharpening

Or with other adjustment it could be like:

  • Original
  • 600 DPI
  • 300 DPI
  • 150 DPI

Or with saturation:

  • -10 saturation
  • Original
  • +10 saturation
  • +20 saturation

We get the 10x15cm test print files we can save (and get all the information overlaid even if wanted to strip corners so we can see later on what were the difference in settings). 

 

And now it is cheap to go and order or print these 10x15cm prints and get a "soft proofing" that way as contact/test sheet without going through lots of custom cropping, laying down the cropped parts as layers, adjusting each layer little differently and then getting them rescaled etc correctly for the image. 

 

And who says it would be limited to strips? Of course we could example select a 20x20cm test print with 5x5 grid with target of 30x20cm. And then we can use X and Y scales for a different settings. Like vertical lines for contrast and horizontal rows for a sharpness. Set the center (3x3 grid position) as default and then have sharpness and contrast to go from - values to + values at left to right. It could be hue, saturation etc. 

 

Then when we do a single 20x20cm print we can easily see the difference in settings and select the wanted one for final. 

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