Black and White in Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop Lightroom Workflow Phase 5: Printing Workflow Whatever output path you choose, at some point in your editing process you will decide that you are ready to see the image in a printed format. Whether you have created extensive layers in Photoshop or choose to print straight from Lightroom, there is one essential concept to understand: your first print will not be your final award-winning portfolio piece. If you have ever printed in the traditional darkroom, you will remember that a final print was a celebration of many attempts toward your vision on paper. The digital process is exactly the same. 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 like in the darkroom we controlled the variables of temperature and dilution as consistently as possible, 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. Monitor Tonal Detail from Monitor to Print: Creating a Step Wedge If we have chosen an inkjet path ­ whether for prints or negatives ­ we need to be able to evaluate the first print effectively. Often times, we are able to see the shadow detail of an image on the monitor, but lose the tonal detail in the translation to the print. In order to easily monitor and evaluate what is happening, we are going to create a grayscale step wedge and print it out. Step 1: Go to the File Menu New. Make the document 10 3.5 inches at 300dpi. Choose "Color Mode Grayscale". Step 2: Select the Gradient tool and set the default color to black and white by hitting the "D" key. Turn off "Dither". Hold the Shift key and click and drag a line from one end of the document to the other, making sure it starts and stops within the document itself. 258