Digital Photography Printing: Get Your DPIs, JPEGs and KBs On Line

By Rika Susan

For most amateur - and many professional - photographers digital photography offers a great new freedom to get the best shots. No more worrying about that precious piece of film running out too soon - all without you knowing for sure that anything worthwhile is on it!

However, when it comes to getting the actual digital photography printing done, there are some things to keep in mind to prevent wasting too much of your quality photo paper - not to mention your precious printing ink.

The first thing to look at is to ensure that you download the pictures at their full resolution. If you end up with 72dpi (dots per inch) pictures your print quality will be useless. A 72dpi resolution is only good for viewing on your computer screen, but 200 - 300dpi will give a good quality 8x10 print.

By looking at the file size you will quickly learn to judge: a picture of 100kb (kilobytes) or less is most probably too low-resolution to print well. Once you get up to a minimum of 400kb you are working with a more useful resolution for an 8x10 print.

When doing digital photography printing you will mostly work with the JPEG file format. Keep in mind that every time you open and save a JPEG file, you lose some of the image information, so you'll want to do all your changes in one sitting, and then save only once.

If you're proud enough of your photographic effort - or if you want those family shots to be available for the next generation - you'll want your prints to be done on decent paper, just like you were used to in the "old days" of photographic paper!

There are many new coated papers available specifically for this purpose, and you should look at what is recommended for the printer you are using.

These papers don't come cheap, so plan carefully and print only after final cropping and other changes you want to make, like perhaps adding a border with your imaging software.

The longest-lasting paper is acid free, usually called archival paper in the world of inkjet printing.

Incidentally, for smaller 4x6 inch prints dye-sublimation printers give excellent quality prints, and they are usually waterproof - like the film prints you were used to! However, the materials for these prints do not come cheap!

If you can't get good enoug results from your printer - especially if you're printing larger than 8x10, you may want to try one of the brick-and-mortar or even online photo labs which make use of dedicated photo printers with excellent results.

More digital photography printing tips:

Regular color inkjet and laser printers are good for text and charts, but not always great for photos.

Printers which are PictBridge-enabled allow you to print directly from the camera.

Photo labs can handle digital files directly from your memory card. Take your homemade CD, your digital camera or your memory card along.

Portable printers such as the HP Photosmart 320 series allow you to take a snap and print out 4x6 pictures anywhere on the move.

Large prints are usually viewed from a greater distance, therefore for a 13x19 inch print 200 pixels per inch is probably enough, whereas for a 5x7 inch print you might need around 300 pixels per inch.

For more information visit http://www.Best-Digital-Photography.com Rika Susan researches, writes, and publishes full-time on the Web. Copyright of this article: 2005 Rika Susan. This article may be reprinted if the resource box - including the link - is left intact.

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