Printing Your Underwater Photos: A Conversation with Jason Bradley

In this article from The Underwater Photography Show, we'll be diving into printing — I sat down with Jason Bradley of Bradley Print & Photo, one of the most respected underwater photography printers around, based in Monterey, California, to talk through everything from file prep to paper choice. Matthew, who normally co-hosts, was out sick for this one, so it's just me and Jason working through a topic I'm happy to admit is one area of underwater photography where I don't have all the answers — getting our images off the screen and onto something we can actually hold: printing.

Jason has an interesting path into printing. He never set out to become an expert printer — he set out to be a photographer, and still considers himself one first. But years of teaching digital workflow and leading trips (which is how we originally crossed paths) morphed into offering printing services to his students, which over time grew into running his own print lab.

I wanted to start broad: why does printing matter at all in a world where most of our images live on screens? Jason's answer was firm — he believes printing is the single most important phase of any photographer's workflow, regardless of genre. It forces a kind of scrutiny you don't get scrolling through files on a laptop. When you decide an image is good enough to print, hang on a wall, and show people, you have to sift through your archive with a much more critical eye than you would when just prepping something for social media or email. You start noticing things — how your colour is rendering, how your technique holds up under real scrutiny — and that feedback loop is essential if you want to keep improving. Hang a substandard picture on your wall, and those rough edges will be there to remind you, every day.

Printing intimidates a lot of underwater photographers, and I put that to Jason directly: where should someone start if they've never prepped a file for print before? His advice was to focus on two things — details and consistency.

For consistency, his top recommendation is investing in a monitor calibrator (he uses a Calibrite display calibrator, around $170 USD) to create an ICC colour profile for your screen. Without it, there will always be a level of mismatch between what you see on your display and what comes back from the lab, which is one of the most common frustrations photographers run into.

For details, Jason pointed to things many of us skip when we're simply prepping images purely for social media: noise and grain structure, edge sharpening, and chromatic aberration in particular. That last one is especially relevant for us as underwater shooters — wide-angle work through a dome port often produces green or magenta halos at the edges of the frame, and those halos are too small to be noticed on Instagram, and yet show up clearly in a high-quality print. Prints reveal the lovely details in our subjects that we want our viewers to see, and also the problems we don't!

Ticking the "remove chromatic aberration" box in Lightroom's lens correction panel is a simple step that noticeably improves print quality. Sharpening is its own discipline too — there's a difference between sharpening for input and sharpening for output, and it's worth learning the distinction.

I asked Jason about the trade-offs between investing in your own printer versus working with a lab like his. Setting up at home means going deep into calibrating not just your display but your printer and your papers too — a real investment of both money and time, with plenty of trial and error along the way.

His advice was to start with a lab regardless. Get a feel for printing, see what you like, and if you find yourself wanting more — hanging prints locally, entering a new phase of your craft, wanting to understand colour management and paper choice on a deeper level — that's the signal to start investing in your own kit.

Blues and greens are, in Jason's words, always the curse for underwater photographers when it comes to printing. Displays project light while prints reflect it, and that perceptual difference makes it genuinely difficult for labs to match what we see on screen — something he says is true across his entire client base, not just anecdotally.

His general recommendation is to steer away from matte papers and toward Baryta, luster, or glossy stock. Baryta papers in particular — named for the barium sulfate additive used to boost longevity and deepen shadow detail — give richer tones and more contrast than matte, which tends to look flatter due to the type of black ink used. Jason specifically favours the Hahnemühle and Canson Baryta papers, and uses Canson's Photo Rag Baryta (100% cotton) for a show of his own currently up at a local natural history museum. He noted it works just as well for black and white underwater images as it does for colour.

Since Jason prints for photographers well beyond Monterey, I asked how that relationship works from a distance. He described it as interactive at the start and hands-off once trust is established. Early on, it's back-and-forth over email or video call to understand what a client wants and needs. Once that trust is built, it becomes simple — send the file, and go. Jason's lab can also handle white-labelled sales, online stores, and ambassador programmes for professional clients, something he says is easier for a smaller lab to offer than it would be at a larger operation.

Jason was clear that his priority is the photography community broadly, not just his own client list — he encouraged anyone with questions about file prep, paper choice, or calibration to reach out to him directly, or to Joe Platko, an accomplished underwater photographer himself who runs the lab and teaches alongside Jason. Listeners of the show also have access to an exclusive offer of 30% off your next order (or your first order) with Bradley Print & Photo — this runs until roughly mid-August 2026, so worth checking the current terms if you're reading this later.

You can watch the full conversation below.