Digital Photo

Digital Photography 101 – Digital Photo Printing Basics

One of the highlights of learning digital photography is sharing your pictures with other people. With digital photography there are many ways you can do this: email, your website, online photography albums, but as for those really good photos, they deserve to be printed and framed in beautiful unique picture frames.

Besides hanging your best photographs in wall picture frames, there are a few other reasons you may find you have for printing your photos. Here are some of the ways you can use printed pictures:

• Displayed in wood picture frames on the mantle, table and wall displays
• Posters
• Wallet pictures
• Memory books
• Greeting cards
• Photo crafts
• Photo competitions

Even in our digital day and age, we still have lots of interesting and beautiful things to do in print! But printing a photograph isn’t as easy as selecting “Print” on your computer. Printing a quality print of a photograph is trickier than printing, say, a flyer. The following tips will make the process easier:

Digital Photography 101 – Pixels Matter

Before you resize a picture on your computer, figure out first if you may ever want to print it. If you do want to print it, always save the original. 

The first thing to understand is how many pixels are needed when taking a picture in order to get a high enough resolution to produce a quality print for the physical size you want. Below are some examples to help you know how many pixels are needed for different sizes of prints.

High Quality Picture: 10×13 inches
2592 x 1944 pixels (5 megapixel camera set for high resolution)

High Quality Picture: 9×12 inches
2272 x 1704 pixels (4 megapixel camera set for high resolution)

High Quality: 8 x 10 inches
2048 x 1536 pixels ( a 3 mega pixel camera set for high resolution)

High Quality Picture: 4×6 or 5×7 inches
1600 x 1200 pixels (2 megapixel camera set for high resolution)

As you can see, you don’t need a camera with tons of megapixels to get quality prints.

Using the proper settings on your printer is also important to getting a quality picture. Check with your manual or the manufacturers recommendations on their website. You can then use a photo editor to resample the pictures to the right dpi. For those new to printing, dpi stands for “dots per inch”. The more dots per inch, the finer the grain of the picture and the better it looks. Ink jet printers used today for printing quality pictures often have dpi resolution of around 1200 to 4800. This range of dpi will make quality prints that have around 140 to 300 pixels per inch.

The ppi (pixels per inch) is the measurement for the resolution of a digital picture and should not be confused with the height and width of a picture. For example a 200 pixel x 300 pixel photograph would be quite small, while a photo with a 300 ppi needn’t be small because ppi refers to the quality not the physical size of the picture.

Digital Photography 101 –  Paper for Picture Perfect Prints

Make sure to use photo printing paper and if possible, use paper that is recommended by your printer’s manufacturer for best results. Use special paper for projects such as greeting cards. You can find them online or at craft stores or office supply stores.

If you’re looking for an easier way to get high quality prints, say for a special event such as a contest or a large size photograph you want to frame and display, remember that a local or online printer is another option.

Have fun printing your digital images!