Adjusting contrast, darkness & detail in Photoshop

quick easy eco-friendly custom digital fabric printing

Lacuna Press 2015

Learn how to get the right intensity for your print

These adjustments can have a huge impact on your print outcome. The adjusted images of a baobab tree should help give you an idea of the sorts of changes that are available to you.

Soft-proofed, contrast +100 — Soft-proofed, contrast at +100

Soft-proofed, with vibrance at +100 — Soft-proofed, vibrance at +100

Soft-proofed, with shadows/highlights adjusted automatically — Soft-proofed, shadows at +35

Soft-proofed, brightness +58, contrast +48 — Soft-proofed, brightness +38, contrast +48

Adjusting contrast and brightness

Select Image, Adjustments, Brightness/Contrast from the Photoshop menu.

Turning up the contrast will tend to:

make dark colours print darker;
accentuate the differences between colours, so bringing more detail into view on the print;
make colours more intense.

Soft-proofed, and with the contrast increased to 100

Soft proofed, and with the brightness and contrast set automatically by clicking the "Auto" button — Soft proofed, and with the brightness and contrast set automatically by clicking the "auto" button

Adjusting vibrancy

Select Image, Adjustments, Vibrance, from the menu. This handy tool adjusts the saturation of your image so that lower-saturated colors are affected more than are higher-saturated colors; it also prevents skin tones from becoming oversaturated. Given that it is usually the case that you have to over-intensify your image colours in order to achieve the effect you want when they are printed on to fabric, that is a particulary handy tool when preparing your images for fabric printing.

The vibrance tool is a very handy way of increasing the vibrance of your image in a controlled way. Ideal for giving your image an intensity boost ready for printing onto fabric

Adjusting shadows and highlights - bring out the detail in your image

Select Image, Adjustments, Shadows/Highlights from the menu. This utility can help you bring out the detail in your image that might not otherwise be visible.

Adjusting the Shadows and Highlights in your image can really help bring out the detail. The settings here were chosen automatically. We have also ticked "Show More Options" so you can see the full range of adjustments available.

Testing different settings

Many of you print different designs as samples, to see how they print out before ordering larger quantities. We suggest that you could also use the same design image, repeat it across a fabric width, and change those different repeats with different colour settings.

For each separate colour adjustment you want to make: