How To Test Your Printer for Photo Printing

If you want to take control of your printing workflow, you need to make sure you are getting accurate results from your printer. That applies whether you are using your own printer or working with a lab. 

One of the challenges of digital photography is that our photographs are no longer physical objects. Instead, they are a bunch of ones and zeros on a storage device. When you view those photos on a display or a print, you are not seeing what your photo really looks like—unless those devices are properly calibrated and profiled. 

It is a lot like music. You can have the sheet music for a beautiful piano piece, but if you play it on an out-of-tune piano, it will sound nothing like the composer intended. To really see what your photo looks like, you need to make sure your display and your printer are adequately in tune. You may think they are, but unless you have done testing to prove it, you can’t be certain. All you know is what you see on your display or printer, and whether you like it or not. Liking your results is not the same as creating accurate results.

If you want to improve your accuracy, start by tuning your printer. An accurate print is the best representation of your photograph that can be made, because a print can show things your monitor cannot. Even with a $1,000 reference-grade LCD display, I know there are times I can’t trust my monitor—but I absolutely MUST be able to trust that my printer will give me the same results, every time, and do it with accuracy. A current generation top-of-the-line printer reveals things monitors simply can’t. Plus, I think printers produce the most personally satisfying rendering of those ones and zeros. 

So, how do you test your printer?

A good starting point is to print the same photo (or maybe 2-3 different photos) on three different papers and compare the results. Do the prints “match” after accounting for the different paper types, or do they look significantly different? How different are they, and do you consider that difference acceptable? Are some of the differences so problematic it would cause you issues when printing? 

Try it out and tell me what you discover in the comments. I think you’ll learn a lot through the process, and it will inform your next steps.