Test Printing on Smaller Paper

[Guest]

I cannot get my head around this:

• I compose my pictures in camera
• my image file resolution is 6000 x 4000
• this gives a natural print size of 25ins x 16.6ins when printing at 240dpi, which I will adjust to A2 print size
• I want to see printed, paper samples of the final image as I am using some painterly effects that may or may not look good at that size
• I do not want to rely on what I see on screen - I need to see it on paper
• I do not want to experiment with sheets of paper of that size as that becomes expensive in both paper and ink

crop How do I print a 6 x 4 that is a 6 x 4 extract of the 25 x 16.6? There is no ruler in the Develop/Crop module so even though I can select the 6 x 4 format and shrink it, I have no way sof telling if the slection is the correct ratio.

I am probably missing something but I do not know what it is.

[Michael J. Hoffman · Accepted solution]

Lightroom can't do precise pixel measurements in the crop tool, I think this is a job for Photoshop. You can create a virtual copy in LR, and Edit In Photoshop. Do your cropping there, where you can use rulers and snapping. Crop a 4x6 area out of the image, save, and send back to LR for printing.

I hope that Helps!

Mike

[Guest]

OK, thanks

[RJS55]

Is there a way now to do this in LrC without resorting to Photoshop?  I am totally ignorant of PS(for now), having limited my explorations to Lightroom.  

[RJS55]

Is there a way now to do this in LrC without resorting to Photoshop?  I am totally ignorant of PS(for now), having limited my explorations to Lightroom.  

[richardplondon]

If you lay out the overall photo in the Print module, on a right sized "page" as you would want to eventually print it - and if you turn off any output PPI resolution override, and enable "Dimensions" in the Rulers, Grid & Guides panel - the photo reports what is the effective native PPI coming from the source image, as well as the page dimensions of this, under this particular printing scenario. You can save this as a print collection to preserve the current print settings, and come back to those.

Now you can make a virtual copy of that same photo; crop it down to show just your ""test extract" area; then lay that image out in the Print module onto a suitably smaller page size; turning on the same "Dimensions"info.

Resize this cropped extract on the small page, watching the effective native PPI figure change after you do so. Repeat by trial and error, fiddling with the crop boundary as needed so it still fits, until the effective native PPI figure that's reported, is reasonably close to the same figure for this, that you saw for the whole photo. This extract is now sized to print at (near-enough) the same physical scale, as the full photo would. So that can act as a representative test print.  

[RJS55]

Richard,  Thank you for the creative and easy to implement approach in LrC.  You are very kind to have taken the time to share.

[richardplondon]

Most welcome!