Digital Focus: Foolproof Photo Printing

Feature: The Nuts and Bolts of Printing Digital Images

On my dining room wall hangs an 8-by-10-inch photograph of two wolves tugging on a bone. It's an eye-catching picture that always seems to draw visitors in close. Even when they get right on top of the frame, though, no one has ever guessed it's a digital photo.

It's gratifying that my digital photos are taken just as seriously as my other pictures--people no longer dismiss them as pixely snapshots--but it took me a while to get to this point. Printing photos is a little bit art, a little bit science.

Start Big

I was inspired to write this week's feature when I read Dorothy Bird's question about printing, which you can find later in this newsletter. As I considered her situation, it occurred to me that a lot of people don't know the best way to approach the printing process. To begin with, it's important to shoot in the camera's highest resolution all the time. You can always make a smaller copy of a picture to e-mail, but there's no way to inject extra pixels or sharpness afterwards if you start with a small image.

What's Your Paper Type?

Don't forget that the quality of your print is only as good as the paper you use. I recommend using a good photo-quality paper, preferably one manufactured by the company that made your printer. Why? Because companies like Canon, Epson, and Hewlett-Packard formulate printer, ink, and paper as a complete system. Use Brand X paper with your Epson ink and printer, and you may not get the results you expect.

After you load the paper into your printer, go into your image editor and open your printer setup dialog box to select the appropriate paper. If you forget to do this, your printer will probably use plain-paper settings to print on your fancy glossy paper and the result will be dull and lifeless.

If you're using Paint Shop Pro, for instance, open the image you want to print, choose File, Page Setup from the menu, and click the Printer button on the Page Setup dialog box. Make sure your printer is selected and click Properties. Look in the printer's Properties dialog box for the option to select the media or paper type and choose the paper type that best matches what you have loaded in the printer. (The specific option to select will vary depending on the features offered by your printer/driver combination.) Often, you can check the paper's packaging for a recommendation.

Set Up Your Page

Now for the final piece of the puzzle. For many folks perhaps the most confusing step in printing a digital image is how to tell the program to print the image at a specific size, like 5 by 7 inches. Most image editors make this step unnecessarily complicated. I'll tell you how to do it in Paint Shop Pro, and then I'll give you an easier shortcut.

In Paint Shop Pro, start by choosing File, Page Setup from the menu bar. Select the proper paper size from the drop-down menu at the top; you'll see a list of sizes supported by your printer. If you intend to make an 8-by-10-inch print, for instance, choose "Letter 8 1/2 x 11 inches," since that's the size of the paper you're using. In the position field in the middle of the dialog box, set the top and left margins to zero--they'll reset to the smallest supported margin (most printers don't support true edge-to-edge printing), and that's good enough. Then click either Portrait or Landscape so the picture fits on the page.

Now for a little experimenting. Click the Fit to Page option and you'll see that the picture may not properly fill the frame. If that's the case, uncheck that option and click the Scale control's up or down arrow until the image fits on the page. As you increase the scale, there will come a point at which some of image will "roll off" the right or bottom edge. Back off until you see the complete picture.

You can print the image like this, or you can do a little cropping. If the picture started to disappear off the bottom before it reached the right side, for instance, you can return to the image editor and crop some of the top or bottom away to make it fit the sides better. This is a trail-and-error process, so trim only a little. (See Help, Help Topics, Index, Cropping an Image if you don't know how to use the Crop Tool.)

Now you're ready to print; choose File, Print from the menu. When your photo comes out of the printer, let it dry for a few hours, then fine-tune it by trimming it down to the exact size you need with a razor blade or paper cutter.

The Cropping Shortcut

As you just saw, it's not easy to crop a picture to a specific size for printing and framing. But there is a low-cost alternative that can simplify this process: A Smaller Image from Trivista, which is available for $15.

A Smaller Image is specialized for cropping. You can drag an image into the program, specify a cropping aspect ratio based on the print size that will deliver the right image for framing, and then change the size and position of the cropping box within the original image to suit your needs. It's the best--and cheapest--way I've found to create pictures with exactly the right dimensions for framing.