How Printing Transformed My Panoramic Photography
Some photos fall apart when you print them. Others come alive.
There is a moment of profound truth every panoramic photographer eventually faces: the first time you hold a large print of your own work. It is a revelation. What felt powerful on a backlit screen might surprisingly fall apart, its intricate details lost, its emotional impact diluted. Yet, other images, perhaps even those you barely noticed digitally, suddenly bloom, demanding space and commanding attention, their story amplified in physical form.
This transformation, exhilarating and sometimes humbling, is where the true essence of your panoramic photography is ultimately revealed. It is not about chasing perfection; it is about profound clarity. What separates a compelling digital file from a truly impactful, gallery worthy print? What makes some of your wide format images carry that immense visual weight, while others simply cannot?
In this post, we will journey through the deliberate choices and iterative processes that, from the moment you choose your film stock to the final preparation for large scale output, elevate a good photo into a commanding, enduring work of art. If you have ever felt that powerful shift, or wondered how to ensure your panoramic vision genuinely thrives on paper, this exploration is for you.
Strategic Film Choices for Panoramic Prints
Grain and Intent: Optimizing Your Film Stock
This article will primarily focus on film choices and how to optimize them for your desired outcome, as my expertise in the development process is too limited. Therefore, I will not be offering in depth advice on this subject. When selecting film, always keep your ultimate goal in mind. Are you shooting for a large print, social media, or a magazine? Each objective can influence your final film choice. I tend to shoot for larger print. Therefore, my preference leans towards film that produces large prints without overwhelming grain. When enlarging for substantial prints, grain becomes more pronounced as it is also magnified. While some shoots deliberately emphasize grain, this is always a distinct artistic choice. Otherwise, I tend to use film with less clearly visible grain and then decide what kind of print I want, colour or black and white.
Flexible Exposure: Pushing and Pulling Film
With either film type, you can intentionally shoot at a different ISO, over or underexposing the film to achieve specific effects. This then necessitates pushing or pulling the film during development, effectively 'pulling back' details onto the negative by developing it for its true exposure. This technique grants greater flexibility and creative freedom with various film types.
Naturally, your film choice should also be influenced by the subject, time of day, and the mood you intend to capture. However, I will not delve into that in depth here.
Scanning Your Film for Print Quality
Regardless of whether you have an immediate print in mind, I strongly recommend scanning your film at the highest possible resolution, especially when it costs no more. Judging a large print's worth from a mere negative is challenging, while past generations honed this skill, I must confess it is one I have yet to master and don’t expect you to have this skill either yet. Moreover, critical details for large scale printing are almost impossible to discern when reviewing negatives at their native size. Thus, a high quality scan empowers you to make informed decisions later.
Why DSLR Film Scanning Matters
First of all, when I refer to scanning I refer to DSLR film scanning, there are other ways of scanning like drum scanning and flatbed scanning, but neither I will treat in this article. Whereby I use a camera to take a photo of my negative which I then convert to a positive image. When scanning be mindful of including all the highlights and shadows. Darks and whites can still be present, but when you don’t expose properly for the negative the highlights and darks can be completely without details. Limiting yourself even more than the limitations given by the negative.
Personally, for negative to positive conversion, I rely on Negative Lab Pro software. It enables you to load your digitally captured negative image and convert it while largely preserving the unique film aesthetic. This software offers specific presets that help retain certain color hues. However, film conversion can also be effectively achieved using Photoshop, VueScan, or other similar software.
My Print Ready DSLR Scan Settings
For DSLR film scanning, set the camera's white balance temperature to 4600K
Set the camera's aperture to f/8 or narrower.
Use an ISO of 100 or lower to minimize digital noise in the scan.
Hold the camera perfectly still and use an exposure setting of approximately 1/2 second
After taking the image crop the image with a little bit of space
Adjust the white balance by selecting the white border
Convert the image
Why should I print my panoramic photo?
Before we delve into the intricate details of editing for a final print, the crucial step of selecting the right image must occur. This is often where the true challenge lies.
How do you know whether a photo is actually good enough to be printed?
This question of quality can be approached in two distinct ways: assessing the technical quality of the image itself, and determining if the image possesses the artistic merit to be considered art. The technical quality of an image is easily quantifiable; numerous online tools can assess factors like pixel density and resolution.
My Criteria for Print Worthy Panoramic Art
The question regarding whether the image is of quality to be considered art is more difficult. One effective method for discerning what resonates as art is through careful observation: why does one piece captivate you while another does not? After consistent exposure to diverse art in physical spaces, you begin to cultivate a discerning eye, understanding your innate preferences and aversions. For me, the key elements are often narrative, simplicity, layering, and subject weight. To elaborate, a narrative image, to my mind, transcends mere visual appeal; it possesses a story that can be immediately perceived.
Simplicity holds paramount importance for me, as the story I aim to tell should be unburdened by distractions; the simpler the composition, the more readily the image's narrative unfolds.
While layering proves challenging to achieve consistently across all images, it refers to the sequence in which elements reveal themselves: what you perceive first, second, and third, if at all. The viewer's eye inherently seeks depth and visual guidance. Think of an XPan street scene where the foreground figure, mid architecture, and distant cityscape reveal themselves sequentially, guiding the eye through the expansive frame.
The subject remains paramount in the image, yet its prominence can sometimes overshadow other elements. This must be a deliberate choice, as the subject is fundamental to the image's narrative.
Editing for Print: What I Do Differently
Screen Versus Paper
Editing for screen and editing for print is different. In prints details matter, whilst for screen often contrast matters. While screens often prioritize vibrant colors, high contrast, and immediate impact, prints emphasize subtle details. On paper, overly 'outspoken' imagery frequently loses its longevity, tending to become visually tiresome or interesting only temporarily, though exceptions certainly exist.
Optimizing Tonality and Color for Print
For print, I often strive to retain full detail in both whites and blacks during file preparation. Furthermore, recognizing that colours often render differently on paper, I consistently create tiny test prints (a practice we will explore later). After making final adjustments and believing I have achieved the optimal colour, I then meticulously optimize the tonality to ensure the full spectrum of that colour exists within the print. This allows the eye to perceive the image in a more natural way, mirroring the full spectrum often found in nature. However, always remember that editing involves a screen's backlight, an element entirely absent in a physical print. This means the perceived brightness and saturation of a colour, and consequently the power of a specific element within the image, will inevitably differ. This often necessitates adding slightly more contrast to a print to achieve the desired impact.
The Power of Test Prints: The Key to Iterating Smarter
When finalizing a print, one can either take a gamble and proceed directly to large format output, or begin with smaller, iterative test prints. These miniature prints provide invaluable clues as to how colours, contrast, and fine details will translate onto paper. I typically print these small tests at 19x7cm (7.5x3 inches), a size sufficient to perceive most crucial details, understand the paper's influence, and identify necessary adjustments.
Once you have produced various edits or even multiple prints of the same image to facilitate your final selection, hang them on the intended display wall. Allow yourself to observe them there for a period, as the surrounding environment will undeniably influence your perception of the print. If any aspect displeases you, this is the opportune moment to make iterations before committing to a large scale print. Test affordably, learn rapidly.
The Detail Crop Trick
Here is a crucial insight often overlooked: while a miniature print is excellent for overall evaluation, it provides limited indication of how fine details will render at a larger scale. To truly ensure an image performs well in a grand format, print a small, detail rich crop of your intended large print. For instance, if you plan a 1 meter (40 inch) wide print, you could print a 1/10th section of it. Select an area dense with details that genuinely interest you. This ingenious technique is a cost effective safeguard against potentially costly disappointment, yet it is surprisingly often dismissed as irrelevant.
Final Prints: Mastering Large Scale Output
There is a difference between prepping for social media and prepping for print. When considering a large print, this also differs from prepping for a small print. A large print, meaning 1,2m (47inch) wide usually in my case, requires you to be very meticulous about the details. If there are any dust spots on the scan of the negative, you ought to make sure this is a choice to retain or remove before blowing it up as a print.
My inaugural large print, despite countless hours spent editing and meticulously preparing colors and details, did not yield the desired outcome. The scan possessed ample pixels, yet lacked the crucial crispness. While this proved to be a painful learning experience, it profoundly taught me what truly matters in large scale printing.
Therefore, I strongly recommend adhering to the steps outlined in this article before proceeding. Finally, two additional considerations are paramount before commissioning your print.
Paper Choice and Online Labs
The chosen paper will undeniably influence how you perceive and experience your work. However, producing a full size test print on archival paper can be cost prohibitive. Thus, I advocate for creating small test prints on your selected paper, utilizing small crops from the final image size. These miniature proofs are critical to avoiding significant financial waste. Consider online labs such as theprintspace.com (not sponsored) which offer a balance of reasonable cost and high quality.
Simple Color Calibration for Accurate Prints
While full color calibration demands a certain expertise to precisely match your screen's colors to a specific printer, for the purpose of this article, I will simplify the process to ensure you gain maximum benefit from a few straightforward steps. Given that you may be investing upwards of $100 on a single print, considering a screen calibrator (often available for $100 or less) is a great investment. While this simplified approach may not yield a perfect match to the printer's output, it will undeniably bring your screen's color representation significantly closer to what the eye will perceive on paper. Affordable calibration tools like Datacolor Spyder or Calibrite can assist in ensuring your screen displays accurate colors, providing a more reliable visual reference for your prints.
Why Big Prints Reveal the Truth About Your Work
Every fine detail is suddenly a large object, you can’t go around and ignore the small things that you might think are irrelevant. In large everything is visible. A large print can easily be overwhelming, too many colours, too many details, too busy etc. Therefore it is of importance to learn to understand why an art piece that you already appreciate does work on a wall and why some don’t. The same rules will be applicable to your work when printing in large. In the end you want something that will last the test of time and this often requires the artwork to be in its “purest” form. If it does not add to the image, remove it, if it already annoys you in small, it will definitely annoy you in large.
Your First Print Challenge: One Frame, One Lesson
Printing your work changes everything. What felt strong on a backlit screen might fall apart on paper. A photo that once stood out can suddenly feel flat, while another which looks less powerful gains unexpected strength once printed large. Some images only begin to speak when they take up space. What once felt like a subtle detail becomes the centre piece. Choices you barely noticed when editing are now permanent, embedded in paper.
An artwork is physical, and with it comes a shift in how you see. Texture, paper weight, and light reflection, these aren’t abstract qualities. On paper these qualities combined are how the image is received. The tactility draws people in, it becomes a physical art work, a well-printed photograph isn’t just seen it’s experienced. And that experience often tells you more about your work than a thousand views online ever could.
Making small test enlargements help you finalise your large print. Cropping one small section of a future large artwork shows you what might fall apart. It’s a slow process, but it invites better questions. Not only “Does this look cool?” but also “Will I still want to look at this in a year?”
The goal is not perfection. It’s clarity. What story does the image carry, and is it strong enough to hold that story on its own? Enlargements ask for intention and that intention speaks volumes when seen in large.
If you’ve printed your work before, what surprised you the most? If you haven’t, what image do you think deserves to take up more space? Perhaps you never liked large artworks and have a good reasons for it, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Share your experiences, questions, or even your doubts in the comments.
