Hi all. I've been shooting UW photography for a few years, but have never had any pictures printed for displaying. I'm not doing this for selling, don't really think my skills are there yet, but my wife has been prodding me to get some printed for artwork for us. I'm planning on doing either metal or acrylic as medium, any suggestions would be great on that topic. Also what I'm most interested in is after doing any post corrections how do you get your photo files ready to be printed? How do you handles sizing? do you set the jpeg file to the canvas size and shape in photoshop to the size you want the end product? or leave the file as big as possible? also do you leave your pictures at original photo format you shot? Or go for square? Most of my work is macro, I haven't done much wide angle yet. TIA

Printing is whole other universe, there's lots of options these days and the quality can be exceptional. I'll describe what is done for inkjet printing. In general terms you size the image to required dimensions at the native resolution of the printer being used. Printing with archival inks is what I would recommend, a good printer can match the gamut of Adobe RGB but not the brightness range of a quality monitor. I print my own prints on an Epson P880 printer which can do up to A2 size.

The choices of printing medium is quite subjective and personal, I tend to favour archival fibre based papers with a lustre finish. If you want to display prints you need to consider reflections from the print - I tend to not like the ultra reflective media that much. You could have a whole chapter on the choice of media available. I generally print with Ilford gold fibre gloss these days.

The ideal inkjet workflow outline is as follows:

• work on a calibrated monitor - the correct brightness is important, if the monitor is too bright the print will look dark.

• Obtain the profile for the paper of choice from whoever does your printing and soft proof it in photoshop to review any colour changes

• Generally work in Adobe RGB, it has a wider range of colours and modern inkjets can reproduce 90-100% of that colour space.

• Make any adjustments needed while viewing in soft proofing.

• Flatten file, re-size to the required size at the recommended dpi setting

• Re-size in PS or program you use to the linear dimensions (mm, cm, inches etc), generally I would leave a 10mm border around the image, some printers can do borderless but it is more of a problem to deal with.

• Sharpen file and preview it at around 50%

For practical purposes find a quality printing firm that uses inkjets with archival inks and follow their recommendations for file preparation. Pay attention to requirements such as flattening and no alpha channels that may be specified, i generally work with tiff files. You could also buy a printer - but they have specific requirements, large format printers are big! they also need to be used regularly. Your choice of medium will be restricted to what they have on offer. Possibly get some A4 prints done to test out a vendor and to see how the colours look and the general look of the paper you are thinking about

As for format I generally crop to suit the subject to whatever dimensions look pleasing.