Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Printing on an Inkjet Printer

If you’re a photographer, you probably use an inkjet printer—most likely of the expanded-gamut variety that uses six to eight inks, rather than the standard four (they’re technically dyes, but most folks call ’em inks). The most common combination of expanded-gamut ink includes the four standard process colors—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK)—plus light cyan and light magenta. You may also have a choice of black inks, like glossy or photo black, matte black, light black, and even light light black (seriously!).

Note

Inkjet printers are more common than dye-sublimation or color laser printers, so they’re the focus of this section. But you can use printer and paper profiles as explained in this section no matter what kind of printer you use.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Why Not Print JPEGs?

Hey, what do you have against JPEGs? It seems like a decent enough file format.

You may be wondering why you shouldn’t save and print images in JPEG format. That’s a legitimate question because, after all, JPEG is the format supported by most digital cameras. There’s certainly nothing wrong with printing a first generation JPEG (the one from your camera); the problem occurs once you start editing, resaving, and then printing subsequent JPEGs.

When you save images as JPEGs, Photoshop automatically shrinks ’em using a process known as lossy compression, which reduces the amount of color info in the image (mainly in areas of fine detail), lowering the image’s quality. ...