Exporting from Darktable for Printing by an Online Vendor

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Hi,

I’ve started work on getting some of my (mono) images into frames on the wall. I’ve had some prints done, some of which are good but a few questions have arisen…

  1. The shadows need to be adjusted to suit the chosen paper. I’m fine with doing that and using the clipping indicator and the resulting prints look good but any adjustments then ‘belong’ to the original image history rather than being specific to one kind of export. I could duplicate but it all seems a bit of a clunky workflow. Is there a better way?

  2. Some vendors dont have an option to add a white border around the printed image to allow room for the mount. Is there a nice way to add one in darktable so that the exported image includes a white border? (…and then question 1 about print specific adjustments comes into play again)

  3. A minor annoyance - I was led astray by the description ‘10:8 in print: 1.20’ in the crop modules. I guess there is a good reason for this description but mathematically 10/8 = 1.25. I see that there is another option for 10 x 8 inches… I just wish I’d spotted it before sending my images for printing.

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If the vendor is serious about printing, they’ll have a softproof profile for their printers that you can download an use. This should give you a good idea of how they’ll look in print.

You can try the frame.module, or add it in gimp.

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I dont think they have one but I will be trying other vendors

Thanks, I’d been poking around in the crop modules and searched for ‘border’… but not ‘frame’. That module should do the job.

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I think this would be the best way and not really clunky…ie do your edit when you are happy duplicate it and then turn on soft proofing esp if you can get a profile and then tweak your edit… to get it back to your original as best you can…you can then name that duplicate as well to inform what it was made for…its only a small xmp file created for a duplicate so its not a big deal for space or storage.

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For points 1 and 2 you could define a style including only the modules you need to go from the original to the print version, and then apply it in append mode in the export module (this is assuming the steps can be made common and consistent across several images).

For example, I have a style ‘white frame 6x4’ which has only the frame module with a 6x4 aspect ratio and my preferred border thickness. Then, I have a preset defined on the export module named ‘print with white frame 6x4’ which, besides defining the maximum pixel size for a 600dpi 6x4 print and giving the JPG file an appropriate ‘for print’ name, appends the corresponding white frame style on export. This way, given any original, I just export using this preset and everything happens automatically.

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Thanks that sounds like a good idea. Should work for the white border. The shadows adjustment probably needs to be done per image though.

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