Photo Printing - The Full Story - Part 1

David Dorn embarks on a series to show you how to get the best from your digital images when you put them on paper. First - how and where to get them!

It all sounds very attractive, doesn't it? Nip out to the shops and buy yourself a scanner or a digital camera to couple with your super-duper colour ink-squirting printer and save loads of cash by printing your own photos, enlargements and so forth. Well, it isn't quite that easy, although the process of procuring an electronic image and producing excellent quality hard copy is relatively simple. There are, however, a few things you need to know.

Sources

So how do you take the first step - acquiring your electronic image? There are three main ways. The first is to let somebody else do it for you, either by downloading images across the WorldWide Web or by having your photographic processor do the digital deed and squirt your next film onto a PhotoCD. Boots, for one, offers that particular service at around fourteen quid for a twenty four frame film. Costs rise the more images you have on a CD, obviously, but the results are usually superb. If you're in a tearing hurry, mind, it's worth noting that the service takes around a week - and it may take a little longer in periods of peak photographic activity. That's the holiday season and, inevitably, Christmas.

You also need to be a bit careful if you're thinking of downloading images across the Web. There's copyright issues to be taken into account, especially if you're looking to plant an image into, say, the local Church Newsletter, and then there's the resolution thing. Resolution? Indeed. Most graphics you see on Web pages are pretty low resolution - normally 72dots per inch (dpi) and generally not even approaching VGA dimensions of 640x480 pixels, the minimum you could reasonably use to generate a 6x4 inch photo print. They're usually either GIF or JPG file types (not that there's anything wrong with either) which means that they will have lost some information - JPG files, particularly, use a 'lossy' compression algorithm. Compare that with a ZIPped file (which loses no information).

Occasionally, though, you'll come across a site that has lots of pics for download - you'll see a thumbnail representation upon which you click to reveal the big picture (literally!) which you can then save to disk for later use. Beware! Some are huge files.

Next up is the almost ubiquitous digital camera. These vary in price from under £90 inc VAT up to what seems like silly money for a fully pro Canon SLR based job. At the lower end of the scale, you get minimum resolution (320x200) and plastic lenses with poor image resolving properties. At the other end, you get triple CCD multi-megapixel resolutions and interchangeable lens systems based on pro-spec camera systems. They'll connect to your PC in a variety of ways, whether it be USB, Parallel, Serial connections, or via Memory Cards which plug directly into certain printers and so forth - the list of available digicams is, if not quite endless, certainly long.

Last is scanners. Like digicams, they come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and flavours, connecting to your PC via SCSI, USB, the parallel port and some serially. There are flatbeds, slide scanners, drum scanners, combined scanners, sheetfed... ad nauseum.

Common to all three ways of acquiring images, though, is the need to understand what they can do for you, and the basic tenets of electronic image printing. The uppermost rule is: The more pixels in your picture, the better it will print.

Manipulation

No matter how you acquire your electronic image, a major consideration when you're working with it is what size it will be printed, bearing in mind our cardinal rule. If it's going to be postage stamp sized on the page, then you really don't need a 100MB + sized file with more dots in it that will finally be printed. If, on the other hand, you're going to knock out a dozen 10x8 inch prints of Great Aunt Bessie's 99th birthday party, then a 2k 320x200 pixel file is not going to do justice to the subject matter. Great Aunt Bessie's expensive hairdo will probably end up looking like five grey bricks plonked on the top of her head. So, we can refine the cardinal rule a little, with this in mind; The more detail your image should show, the greater the resolution it requires.

Next time, I'll start looking at how you can manipulate images to suit your purposes. I'll be using PaintShop Pro, which is available for download in our download libraries.

Part 2

Dave Dorn