questions on making posters

I'm going to make a couple 20x30 posters, I've never really printed my photos before...

a few general questions...

- If I took the photos in RAW (nikon d80, 10megapixels), will the posters look much better if I send them a TIFF file instead of a high-quality (level 10) JPEG file? I imagine the TIFF files will take much longer to upload....

- do LUSTRE or GLOSSY formats usually look better for underwater photos?

- I've never played around with color schemes / color spaces before, I believe my photos default to sRGB? (the top of my photos say RGB/8). out of laziness I was planning on not calibrating my monitor, adjusting my monitor to their output, or viewing my photos using their profile, or changing the color space, or anything like that. Is this a grave mistake? Will my posters most likely look similar to how I see them on my screen? I'm using a pretty good SHARP flat-panel monitor.

thanks,

Scott

Calibration:

If you don't want to be frustrated - calibrate your monitor. That is really very important if you do not want to be surprised when your prints look completely different from what you see on your monitor., and you should calibrate at least every time you plan to prepare some pics for printing and the web.

What type of file:

It does not sound like you want to do any post-processing, so then there is no advantage to even taking your pictures in RAW. The best then is just shoot in high quality JPEG and send them high quality JPEG, and let your camera do the processing. TIFF files are pretty large. Again, if you are not manipulating your images much or at all, you are not going to lose significant image quality if you do a single save from RAW to jpeg.

Colour Space:

Just be consistent, sRGB or AdobeRGB will both work fine for your purposes. The RGB/8 is probably referring to the fact that your image is being shown in an RGB space at 8 bit. Again, if you are not manipulating your images, don't worry about it.

Lustre or Glossy:

Whatever your preference, Glossy will probably appear a little more contrasty and bright.

This is a very brief overview of a huge subject(s), but sounds like you want to keep it simple so I would suggest shooting in high quality JPEG, calibrate your monitor, use the same colour space in camera as you are using on your monitor / software, and print glossy. You may want to get an 8x10 or two first of your prints from the lab, to make sure they turn out the way you expect, before committing to the expense of bigger prints.

Loftus, thanks for your reply.

just to clarify, I've already taken the photos.

I shot them in RAW, did some processing using photoshop raw (adjusted white-balance if needed, shadows, exposure, etc.), saved them as a high-quality jpeg, and then did more processing if needed (crop, levels/curves, shadows/highlights, healing-tool, etc.)

so I do a decent amount of post-processing.

let me know if this changes any of your answers - thanks

Scott

Calibration:

If you don't want to be frustrated - calibrate your monitor. That is really very important if you do not want to be surprised when your prints look completely different from what you see on your monitor., and you should calibrate at least every time you plan to prepare some pics for printing and the web.

What type of file:

It does not sound like you want to do any post-processing, so then there is no advantage to even taking your pictures in RAW. The best then is just shoot in high quality JPEG and send them high quality JPEG, and let your camera do the processing. TIFF files are pretty large. Again, if you are not manipulating your images much or at all, you are not going to lose significant image quality if you do a single save from RAW to jpeg.

Colour Space:

Just be consistent, sRGB or AdobeRGB will both work fine for your purposes. The RGB/8 is probably referring to the fact that your image is being shown in an RGB space at 8 bit. Again, if you are not manipulating your images, don't worry about it.

Lustre or Glossy:

Whatever your preference, Glossy will probably appear a little more contrasty and bright.

This is a very brief overview of a huge subject(s), but sounds like you want to keep it simple so I would suggest shooting in high quality JPEG, calibrate your monitor, use the same colour space in camera as you are using on your monitor / software, and print glossy. You may want to get an 8x10 or two first of your prints from the lab, to make sure they turn out the way you expect, before committing to the expense of bigger prints.

If you are doing a fair amount of processing, then keep them in RAW or PSD (Photoshop format) at least until you are ready to send to the print service. Do not work on them in JPEG, because every time you resave in JPEG you degrade the quality because this is a compressed format. You may want to check with whoever is doing your prints as to what format they prefer. PSD or TIFF are the best as long as file size is not an issue. Probably you will not lose significant quality if you use high quality JPEG as long as you are not saving and resaving multiple times to JPEG, and you only save to JPEG one time for the final file.

If you do spend the time to work on your pics, then it is even more important to calibrate for consistency.

One other thing, if you are doing a fair amount of post-processing, you may want to do it in 16bit, and then change to 8 bit when you do your final save for a smaller file.

Couple of additions to the excellent advice given by Loftus.

You need to understand the processing shop that is doing the print - I use an online shop and they only take jpeg.

Leave your pic in 16bit PSD right up until the last edit, then sharpen.

Often it is dead cheap to experement with 6x4 size prints to get an idea of how the final image will look, here in the UK it can be 10p ( $0.20 ) a print - just mod a spread with different brightness and sharpness to try it out.

For my print shop I lighten the image and sharpen more than I would for screen viewing. In fact my images for print look terrible on screen, some say they don't look too good on the wall but that is another story.

Often the online printers have offers which are well worth waiting for.

You have to colour calibrate - if you don't it is a lottery.

Paul C

A small test print can work well in leiu of callibration

I would look for processing artifacts if you are doing so much post processing. They could look very nasty at 20 x 30"

You can actually do an experiment to show you how you are losing quality if you work over and over with repeated saves in JPEG. Work on a pic in JPEG, save then repeat a few times, and look at the histogram. You will see gaps in the histogram. Those gaps are all lost data.