Photoshop 7 and CS How to Centre Prints when using Mac OS X By Ian Lyons A Computer Darkroom Tutorial Ever since Photoshop became available for Mac OS X I've received a large number of emails from OS X users asking how to centre images on a page. These emails also reflect queries I was noticing on various Photoshop related forums and mail-lists. Two Aspirin and a Glass of Water! What's with this silly sub-title?
Unfortunately the current implementation of the ' Epson printer driver' for Mac OS X does not directly support printing images to the centre of the page. Neither does the driver support borderless prints or custom paper sizes. So, with these three shortcomings we find Mac OS X users end up with a headache! So apart from the Aspirin what can we do to get rid of the headache?
Calibration Bars: This option adds an 11-step grayscale bar outside the image area when printing to a paper size that’s larger than the image area. You can use calibration bars to gauge how accurately the gray tones of an image are being reproduced. How to set up a custom user defined paper size for your inkjet printer with Photoshop CS5 CS6 CC on a Mac. For Red River Paper greeting cards, scrapbook 12x12 sheets, panorama printing, and other special projects, you need to define a custom paper size in the printer properties.
OK things aren't so bad we do have a number of options and I'll discuss one in this tutorial. Virtually all (if not all) Epson inkjet printers are designed to print with a 3mm (approx 0.12-inches) margin on three sides and a 14mm (0.55-inches) margin on the remaining side (i.e. The trailing edge). As a further aid to demonstrating the problem I have shown a diagram for a Landscape format page indicating the margin dimensions. The inner boundary defines the printable area and the outer the full area of the page.
Photoshop Image Size For Printing
Note: the same margins apply for all media sizes. Since the printable area is in fact off-centre it should be pretty obvious from the above diagram that centring an image on a page isn't going to happen without some help. Where do we get this help? The Photoshop Print-with-Preview dialog has a checkbox labelled Center Image and in theory this should be our helping hand but unfortunately it doesn't appear to function in the way users expect. To truly centre the image we need to apply an offset to the left/top margin when printing. How do we find the value of the offset and thus the centre of the Page rather than the centre of the Printable Area as Photoshop seems to be giving us? The mathematics is simple: (Right Margin - Left Margin) / 2 = Offset substituting in the values gives: (14 - 3) / 2 = 5.5mm or 5.5 / 25.4 = 0.22-inches Realistically very few of us are going to notice or even worry about 0.5 mm or 0.02 inches and so we can say the required offset is 5mm or 0.2-inches.
Putting our Offset to Use Assuming we aren't attempting the impossible and trying to centre a maximum sized image the above offset value when applied will ensure that our images are printed at the page centre. Here's how I do it for landscape format prints:.
Open Print with Preview. Ensure Center Image is checked (required so that Photoshop calculates the appropriate margin size). Note the Left margin value Step 1 In the above example my Left margin as found by the OS/Photoshop is 1.5- inches and so to centre my image I need to add the 0.2-inch offset to this value (i.e. However, before we can alter the margin values we must uncheck Center Image.
Once this has been done we simply substitute our new value into the left margin window and proceed to the next stage in the printing process. Step 2 Important: leave Center Image Unchecked! Portrait Format For Portrait format prints we follow a broadly similar process but this time we adjust the Top margin: Step 1 Step 2 Note: the initial margin values are automatically determined in Step 1 and are dependant on the relationship between ' image' size and ' media' size. The offset will be constant for your printer. Since I've not used an Epson inkjet printer were the 0.2-inch offset wasn't appropriate you can take it that all the hard work has been done for you - use 0.2-inches for your offset.
Maximising Image on a Page Maximising the image on a page shouldn't normally present the user with a problem, but it seems that it does (at least for some). OK the feature has moved from Page Setup to Print with Preview but I ask you 'is this so hard to find?' For some the answer is yes. Surely the term Scale to Fit Media in the Print with Preview dialog as shown below should be self explanatory. Before To be fair I think many of those trying to find/use Maximise Image are really trying to overcome the centre to the page issue discussed above and getting into a muddle. Enough of this waffle.! Simply clicking the Scale to Fit Media checkbox in the Print with Preview dialog causes the image to stretch and fill the page, but it will only print within the printable area (remember with X we cannot print to the edges, yet!).
It is also worth noting that the workaround I discussed above for centring an image on the page is disabled and so we end up with the unwanted offset all over again (grhhhhhhhhh!). At time of writing this tutorial there is no workaround for this debacle. After Before anyone chirps up and says that we can use Page Setup to configure custom media sizes and thus eliminate the need for the offset - I KNOW.
Is Photoshop Only For Mac
I also know that the Epson Windows and Mac OS 9 driver for many printers allows the users to centre the image within the page. However, the Epson OS X driver doesn't fully support custom media sizes, image centring, etc and short of these issues being resolved Mac OS X users are stuck with workarounds or an Aspirin overdose! Contents on this site: Ian Lyons © 1999 - 2018. All Rights Reserved.