Sharing Digital Photos For Dummies by Julie Adair King

Author:Julie Adair King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Choosing Photo Paper

With photo paper, as with most things in life, you get what you pay for. The better the paper, the more your images will look like traditional print photographs. In fact, if you want to upgrade the quality of your images, simply changing the paper stock can do wonders.

If your printer can accept different stocks, print drafts of your images on the cheaper stocks, and reserve the good stuff for final output. “Good stuff,” by the way, means photographic paper from a well-known manufacturer, not the cheap store brands. Start with paper from the manufacturer of your printer because that paper is specifically engineered to work with your printer’s inks. The prints you make with that paper can give you a baseline from which you can compare results on other brands.

Don’t limit yourself to printing images on standard photo paper, though. You can buy special paper kits that enable you to put images on calendars, stickers, greeting cards, window decals, transparencies (for use in overhead projectors), and all sorts of other stuff. Some printers even offer accessory kits for printing your photos on coffee mugs and t-shirts. And if you use an inkjet printer, try out some of the new textured papers, which have surfaces that mimic traditional watercolor paper, canvas, and the like.

Setting Print Size and Resolution

As mentioned several times earlier in this chapter, many printers enable you to output prints right from a memory card or from the camera. If you’re going that route, just follow the instructions in your printer manual. There’s really not much to do in advance of printing except specify the size of the print and the number of copies, which you do either via your camera menus or buttons on the printer.

Many photo-editing programs also offer simplified printing, providing wizards that ask you to set only print size and other basics. If you like the results you get from these automated printing utilities, great. But keep in mind that when you set the print size this way, you let the printer software or your imaging software make the all-important resolution decision for you.

Here’s a couple things to keep in mind:

Resolution — pixels per inch — has a major impact on print quality. To do their best work, most printers need 200 to 300 pixels per inch. If you’re having your picture output at a professional lab, you may be required to submit the file at a specific resolution.

When you enlarge an image, one of two things happens: The resolution goes down and the pixel size increases, or the software adds new pixels to fill the enlarged image area (a process called resampling). Both options can result in a loss of image quality.

To figure out the maximum size at which you can print your image at a desired resolution, divide the horizontal pixel count (the number of pixels across) by the desired resolution. The result gives you the maximum print width (in inches). To determine the maximum print height, divide the vertical pixel count by the desired resolution.

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