My first prints from my GH5 are a disaster! Where am I going wrong?

C Sean wrote:

Just a quick update.

I was been meaning to post an update for a few weeks but haven't got around to it for some reason. The books themselves are very large and are approx 38cm x 28cm.

I did have a discussion about this with a friend who mother is a pro photographer and use a printing company for her work. Usually her books cost her about £400 and very often the printing company get them wrong. She often return the books back and get the printing company to carefully re do it.

Now I need to put my hands up. With my lack of experience with Lightroom and even less with printing. A lot of mistakes are from my part.

The first book I'd made was my trip to Kenya last year. This was the time I started to get to grips with Lightroom and created a few presets to make my work flow much easier. When I exported my images, I was making a mistake by exporting them to be seen on a monitor and not converting them ready to be printed. The results were cleaner prints than my Goodwood Revival book.

So this means the CWE program was producing cleaner images of JPGs designed for the screen than for print. The Kenya images had more sharpening added to the images than my Goodwood and they came out cleaner. In the Goodwood images, where there shouldn't be any noise, there were in the print. However, at the time I didn't do any soft proofing.

I'd found in the CWE where the automatic tweaking options are and I can't get my head around.

There a tick box with : Apply Automatic Image Optimisation to all new images. The tick box is tick.

Then we have a separate part with : Apply to all photos that have been edited in an image editing program. And it's on the option of having no image optimisation.

Then we have a bit about JPEGs converted for the screen.

When I played with the settings, it appeared automatic tweaking wasn't added to my photos except for the in camera JPEGs I accidentally shot. These settings are the ones I used for the Goodwood book.

So there are two things I will do.

1. Speak to Jessop which I haven't done that yet.

2. There a promotion with Pic Presets and I might get them to help with editing my photos.

Do you print at home, what printer? I print with the dxo elite tool and honestly its fab, I have an epson sc-400 and can print large colour prints, a3+, from highly cropped images without issue. I can go through my settings but the colour and detail is outstanding.