Digital Photography Printing: Simplifying the Pixels and DPI?sPosted by Nick Niesen on October 26th, 2010 Digital photography printing has opened new avenues for amateur and professional photographers alike. For most photographers, the backup of digital photography printing offers unprecedented freedom to get the best shots. No more worrying about wasting that precious piece of film running out, in addition to not knowing for sure that anything worthwhile is on it! However, when it comes to getting the printing done, there are a few things one should keep in mind to prevent wasting too much of quality photo paper, and the costly printing ink. In this article, we?ll review a few basic terms related to digital photography and offer a few tips on getting the best prints. Resolution With digital photography printing in mind, the first thing you need to ensure is that you download the pictures at their full resolution. If in the end, you have 72dpi (dots per inch) pictures, your print quality will be useless. A 72dpi resolution is good for viewing on your computer screen, but an image with 200 to 300dpi will give a good quality 8x10 inch print. Pixel JPEG When dealing with digital photography printing, you will mostly work with the JPEG file format. Remember that every time you open and save a JPEG file, you lose some of the image information. Therefore, it is advisable to do all the changes in one sitting, and then save them only once. Resolution Guide to Quality Prints 1 to 2 Megapixels 3 to 4 Megapixels 5 to 6 Megapixels 7+ Megapixels By simply looking at the file size, you will quickly learn to be an expert judge on quality. A picture of 100kb (kilobytes) or less is most probably too low-resolution for good quality digital printing. Once you get to a minimum size of 400kb, you are working with a more useful resolution for an 8x10 inch print. Printing Paper There are many new coated papers available on the market specifically for this purpose, and you should consider what is recommended for the printer you are using. Archival paper, popular in the world of inkjet printing, is the longest-lasting paper and it is acid-free. These printing papers don't come cheap, so plan carefully. Print only after final cropping, or on completion of other changes, such as after the addition of a border with your imaging software. Regular colour inkjet and laser printers are good for text and charts, but not always best for digital photography printing. PictBridge-enabled printers allow you to print your digital photographs directly from the camera. Portable printers, such as the HP Photosmart 320 series, allow you to take a picture and print 4x6 inch sized pictures anywhere on the move. Incidentally, for smaller 4x6 inch prints, dye-sublimation printers give outstanding quality prints, and they are generally waterproof. However, the materials for such printing do not come cheap! Photo labs can easily handle digital files directly from your memory card. Take your digital camera, a homemade CD, or your camera?s memory card along for professional quality digital photography printing. Like it? Share it!More by this author |