Black and White in Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop Lightroom V. Tweaking This is actually the heart and soul of the fine art print making process. The process of tweaking occurs after you have followed all of the previous steps and suggestions in the printing workflow, with specific attention to color management, and you are still not completely happy with the results. Remember, your first print will be for evaluative purposes. It may take several prints, over the course of many long work sessions to realize your aesthetic vision in its final portfolio piece format. As we learned with color management, the system is imperfect and the key to the inkjet output process is reducing the number of variables through a color managed system, and the rest is all in the tweaking! Just as we controlled the variables of temperature and dilution as consistently as possible in the traditional darkroom, made a print, studied it and made changes again and again until we were aesthetically pleased with the results, the digital darkroom is no different. You will need to go back to your working file and use your digital darkroom processes, tools and skills to make additional changes based on the look and feel of the print. Typically, prints translate darker than the monitor portrays the image, because monitors transmit light while ink on paper reflects light, and reflective light is darker than transmitted light. Make sure to evaluate the print under the correct lighting source in which the print is intended to be viewed, that is, not the kitchen fluorescent. Bring the image back into Photoshop to make digital darkroom adjustments and corrections, and repeat the entire process until you are satisfied with the results. Tweaking is really the art of the fine print, the extra attention that makes a print worthy of the portfolio or exhibition. B. Printing from Lightroom The Print Module in Lightroom offers the creative user a wonderful variety of options for image output. From a potpourri of quick and easy contact sheets, picture packages, and page layout presets, to the ability to create and save your own layouts, borders and image overlay integrations ­ Lightroom is not only easy, but also offers an abundance of creative options. Lightroom Print Module While Lightroom has many quick and easy user-friendly features, worth discussion, there is only so much that the fine art printer can do in the Print Module without needing to move the image over to Photoshop. A few major drawbacks to printing from Lightroom include RGB-only printing, lack of sharpening control, and the inability to softproof your images prior to printing. Hopefully, these issues will soon be addressed, but until such time my recommendation for highest quality output, with the greatest amount of control, is to export and print from Photoshop as previously outlined. 282