12 Photo Printing Tips

Date: March 22, 2010

New York, NY -- Perhaps you have previously tried printing your own photos with less than stellar results in your estimation. As M. David Stone of PC Magazine points out, what mistakes you are making may be very easy to correct. He offers 12 tips for printing better photos and we have outlined them below. There are arguments for and against printing photos at home compared to printing them at a drugstore or other places with kiosks, but after the reading the tips, maybe the satisfaction of doing it yourself will outweigh the other factors.

Before we get to the tips, there are a few things that are almost universally true when it comes to printers. Laser printers, despite efforts on the part of manufacturers, are not anywhere close to inkjets in terms of photo printing quality. Average inkjet printers are capable of roughly the same quality as drug store prints. If you buy a dedicated photo inkjet or a near-dedicated photo inkjets you can get better quality than a drug store print. And now without further ado, the tips:

Various Direct Printing Options
Printing directly from a camera versus printing from a memory card or USB drive can actually yield somewhat different looking photos. There could be differences in how colors are displayed as well as differences in shading and the fine details produced. Because of this, try printing a variety of photos both ways to determine the extent of the difference.

Auto-correction features to the rescue?
Any dedicated photo printer you buy should have some type of auto fix feature. There may also be some of these features on inkjet models. Canon Pixma printers, for instance, come with something called “Auto Fix II”. As with the printing methods, you owe it to yourself and your photos to experiment.

Be Sure You What You Are Printing
For direct photo printing without your PC, you are likely to have the option of choosing photos one of two ways, through a printed index sheet or from a preview screen. Each has its own advantages that one needs to bear in mind. The preview screen is the cheaper of the options because you don’t have to waste ink or paper to decide what you want to print. However, if you have tried to cover your bases by taking the same photo over and over and tweaking the settings each time, a preview screen may not adequately display the subtle differences between each photo. This includes things like how colors will print and how the shading will be represented.

Let Your Printer Do Some of the Heavy Lifting
Many if not all of the photo printers that come with preview screens will allow you to edit photos before actually printing them. This can include features like cropping, red-eye removal, adjustment of brightness and contrast, etc. Figuring out how to work with them will help you produce the results you want.

Look Before You Edit
Keeping in mind what we have said already, there can be some differences seen by the naked eye when you compare what is on your screen to what the output looks like when it exits the printer. Before adjusting any of the other settings, cropping your picture is preferable so you don’t print anything you know you won’t want in the photo. Before embarking on manual changes like we described in the previous paragraph, try the autofix feature if your printer has one and print the same photo using it and one that has not been fixed.

Match Up Your Paper
This is probably one of the most important tips. While you can print on normal inkjet plain paper, it is not designed to absorb the amount of ink that will be produced by a photo. The better the paper you by the better your prints should be. However, in buying better paper, you will also be spending more money. Before buying the paper or printing the photo, keep in mind what you are going to do with the finished product.

Check Into Other Paper
While the prevailing type of paper you will find has a glossy finish like they use at drugstores, there is also photo paper available in a matte finish. As matte is the finish preferred by many professional photographers it warrants some of your consideration as well. Also you will want to keep in mind the brand of paper you wish to use and the brand of your printer. Despite what packaging may or may not tell you, each company’s paper is optimized to be printed on that manufacturer’s printers.

Check that Setting Match
To get the best quality results, you will need to check and make sure that your printer knows what kind of paper is coming, if there are no autodetection settings. That, however, is far from an exact science and sometimes manually changing the setting is best.

Use a Photo Editing Program to Print
According to Stone, you will get the best results in photo printing when you transfer the photos to your computer and then use a photo-editing program to print. There is a reason, he points out, that most photo printers aimed at serious amateurs or professional photographers do not offer direct printing. Those individuals know that they can achieve better results using a program to adjust size, brightness, contrast, resolution, etc. If you have such a program that came with your camera or printer, all the better, but if not, you can download Google’s Picasa or something similar.

Copies are For Editing, Originals are For Saving
In case anything goes awry with your photo editing, it is advisable to save the original and make yourself a copy to edit. That way, no matter what happens you still have an original.

Avoid Compressed Photos, If Possible
If at all possible, try to change the settings on your camera to not compress your photos. This should improve the quality of your photos. It is also important, Stone notes, you should not edit a compressed photo on your machine and then save it back to a compressed format. The compression actually results in the loss of some data each time. So, if possible, try and use the editor’s default file type.

Check Out Your Printer Driver
Each printer driver should give you the option of at least choosing between the level of print quality be it best, normal, or fast/draft. It may also give you the option of changing the contrast, or the level of red, green, and blue in your prints. Knowing which settings to change and how they effect your photos is key to printing better images each time.

BY ADAM HAIGH, Editor