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Old 17-04-2022, 04:36 PM
Craig_
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Craig_ is offline
 
Join Date: May 2020
Location: Sydney
Posts: 315
One of the most important aspects of monitor calibration when it comes to printing is IMO not the colours, although this is of course important, but brightness. Most people have their monitor brightness cranked way too high, and prints on a medium without that glorious backlight illumination end up looking incredibly dim. I print a lot, although mostly landscape stuff rather than astro, and I keep my monitor at 100 cd/m2. Even then I generally need to bump the brightness a bit for the final print.

Size vs DPI depends on your medium (paper, metal, canvas) as well as viewing distance. If you see yourself sticking your nose up to the print a lot to take in fine details you will need higher native resolution than if you are generally viewing from further back. 300 DPI native (before resizing) is ideal but hard to achieve for a print of any reasonable size. I have printed onto paper stock at 200-ish DPI with great results. Canvas can tolerate even less. Use resizing software to upscale to your desired output size for a better result, and adjust your sharpening accordingly.

I use specialists to print. All depends on budget though. One trick I've found helpful in the past if you're unsure about resolution / DPI is to do a 100% crop from your desired print size and do a cheap print at Big W / OW to check it out. By this I mean let's say you wanted to make a 24" wide print at 200 DPI. To check you're happy with the final resolution and sharpnening, crop a 6x4" chunk at 100% out of that 24" and get a cheap Big W print done. You'll easily know if the file is going to deliver the detail you want or if you need to revisit your resizing / sharpening or desired output size.
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