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

I'm very new when it comes to developing my raw files to JPEG. It's only in the last year or so I been shooting less JPEG and spending more time developing raw files. While I wouldn't call myself a newbie but in reality I'm more in the experimenting stage and gaining confident. More time I spend in Lightroom, better the results will become.

In the last twelve months I also have an interest in printing. I would rather have my best holiday photos in books and assessable rather than locked away on a hard drive. I had my photos from the trips to Botswana and Kenya printed into three books and the results were a mix bag. The pictures lacked definition and sharpness. The later attempts I increased the contrast and sharpness and the results weren't improved that much. The pictures were acceptable and because it wildlife shots, they weren't that bad but they weren't clean. They were graining, lack sharpness and definition.

What I was doing was going to Lightroom and exporting the pictures to be printed on shiny thick paper. I then use the Jessops Photo program to create book using the exported pictures.

A few weeks ago I went to Goodwood Revival which is a car show with vintage car racing. I used the GH5 for most of my shots and it has a 20-megapixel sensor and no AA filter. So the pictures from the camera will be sharper than say the GH4. My shots from the GH5 at a zoo are sharper than my pictures I took with the GH4 in Africa.

I had a good day at Goodwood Revival and I decided to get my pictures printed in a book. This time around I used less sharpness so I wouldn't have so much noise, not have as much contrast and use noise reduction to clean the image. The book came today and they're no different to my African ones. The pictures are covered in noise, there's no sharpness to them and there is no definition.

So logically I'm either doing something wrong or my Lightroom skills are terrible. However, during Goodwood, I used a custom setting not realising the custom setting is JPEG only not JPEG + RAW. Some of the pictures I used for the book are in camera JPEG and they have the same problems as the developed raw files converted to JPEG.

I am planning to go to a Jessops store and bring one of my photo books with me to find out where I'm going wrong. My thoughts are even with a Sony A7r mkII and a super sharp prime I would get me the same results. The other thoughts are I'm throwing away money and I probably better off using an one inch sensor camera and use a cheap printer. The pictures in the book look like it was taken with an old compact camera. My other thoughts that the pictures are being blown up. So maybe I need to put in the exact resolution in the export stage but even on the Jessops program the pictures don't look dull.

Any thoughts?

C Sean wrote:

Any thoughts?

Show us some images.

When replying, just click on the "insert image" icon, second from the right. Select 'insert image from your computer' for best results.

If your images look good to you on a monitor then it would seem you are either not correctly saving them in the form the printer requires, presumably sRGB, or the printing service stinks. An image may look sharper than it really is when viewed on something like the small camera LCD but even a small laptop screen should reveal whether the image is seriously out of focus or affected by movement.

It may be a combination of both your processing technique and the lack of quality control by the printing service.

A way to test the printing service is to send them a batch of jpegs made in the camera and do not alter the files in any way. If they can not print them with reasonable accuracy you have solved part of the mystery. You can also send some files processed in your usual manner to a different printing service and see what you get.

A frequent contributor to these forums has a site digitaldog.net with exceedingly helpful videos to learn about color spaces, color management and sRGB conversion. I can not think of a better place to start if you want to optimize your processes.

bmoag wrote:

If your images look good to you on a monitor then it would seem you are either not correctly saving them in the form the printer requires, presumably sRGB, or the printing service stinks. An image may look sharper than it really is when viewed on something like the small camera LCD but even a small laptop screen should reveal whether the image is seriously out of focus or affected by movement.

It may be a combination of both your processing technique and the lack of quality control by the printing service.

A way to test the printing service is to send them a batch of jpegs made in the camera and do not alter the files in any way. If they can not print them with reasonable accuracy you have solved part of the mystery. You can also send some files processed in your usual manner to a different printing service and see what you get.

A frequent contributor to these forums has a site digitaldog.net with exceedingly helpful videos to learn about color spaces, color management and sRGB conversion. I can not think of a better place to start if you want to optimize your processes.

Excellent advice, and if you then post in the Printers and Printing forum you will get some sage advice, including from DigitalDog (but he may first direct you to one or a few of his videos 😉).

I downloaded all three of your images. They appear to be oversharpened, causing noise-like artifacts all through them. Look specifically at the roundel on the Spitfire tail, the woman's skin and cuff of the safety jacket.

What I was doing was going to Lightroom and exporting the pictures to be printed on shiny thick paper.

STOP!

These book printers use equipment and automatic corrections carefully tuned and calibrated to make the best out of plain out-of-camera snapshots. Don't try to outsmart them - just process your raw files to full-size (!) JPGs that look good on screen and you should be fine. The photos won't look as bright as on your monitor because paper has a smaller dynamic range - but they should otherwise look very good.

Again, be sure to submit full-sized images - in the case of your 20MP camera I think that would be 5184 x 3888 pixels (smaller only if you have cropped them) - don't resize them and don't have them resized in exporting. From your description of what went wrong (grainy, no sharpness and definition) I suspect that this is where it went wrong. Maybe you can still return this book? Most suppliers seem to offer a satisfaction guarantee.

I downloaded all three of your images. They appear to be oversharpened, causing noise-like artifacts all through them.

Agreed, and I think that overly strong noise reduction was applied before that (hence the loss of detail).

The woman's skin in particular looks pretty bad. You'll need to find a different balance between noise filtering and sharpening. If you could upload the RAW of that image to a file hosting site, perhaps a few of us could try a different raw developer to show the difference.

In general, if you're shooting raw anyway, it is better to "expose to the right" i.e. maximize the exposure without clipping the highlights, then reduce the brightness in post-processing for the desired result. Zebra's on the GH5 are very useful for that, but check that their default setting isn't too low (I set them at 100%).

C Sean wrote:

The pictures are covered in noise, there's no sharpness to them and there is no definition.

I print directly from LR to an inkjet, and never had any problems via sharpness and noise even with "higher noise images" (I am still amazed how good the prints are, and how far home-printing has come). The only issue is getting the colours right, which I achieved after some test prints.

Seems that there is a problem with your photobook provider. The ones I sent also never had any sharpness/noise issues (they were made using the native software of the provider though). Or my standards are just too low ...

Regards

C Sean wrote:

Here are some of the images used for the book.

Those four images are all full resolution, 20MP files.  In your earlier post, you said you exported from LR with some setting to output 10MP files.  You should upload here some examples of the actual 10MP files that you sent to the printer to be included in the book.

You're confusing megabytes and megapixels. Do not downsize your images.