Digital Focus: An Easier Way to Print

Feature: An Easier Way to Print With Paint Shop Pro

Good morning, class, and welcome to math for digital photographers. Today's lesson: paper size. Ink jet paper--even the high-quality stuff designed for photo printing--comes in standard letter size, which measures 8.5 by 11 inches. Picture frames, on the other hand, come in 8 by 10. They don't match--and that's been the bane of digital photographers for years.

When you print a photo on a standard ink jet printer, you invariably end up trimming the full-page photo to fit in a frame. I've written a feature on how to do this; see "Digital Focus: Foolproof Photo Printing." However, reader Ralph Grabowski recently reminded me about an oft-overlooked and much easier way to print your photo at a specific size, like 8 by 10 inches. The technique is too good to pass up, since it'll save you a lot of tweaking and nudging during the print process.

Have Enough Pixels

As always, you should start with a digital image that has enough resolution to print at the size you have in mind. For an ink jet, I suggest having the ability to send 200 to 300 pixels per inch to the printer.

So if you want to make an 8-by-10-inch print, your digital file should be no smaller than 1600 by 2000 pixels (that corresponds to a standard 3.3-megapixel image). Anything more than 2400 by 3000 pixels (about 6 megapixels) would be overkill. Not sure how large your digital image is? Load it into Paint Shop Pro and choose Image, Image Information from the menu.

Set Your Paper Size

Now it's time to make sure you have the right paper size selected. In Paint Shop Pro, choose File, Page Setup and select the appropriate paper in the Size menu. If you're making an 8-by-10-inch print, for instance, you'll need letter-size (8.5 by 11) paper. Also, choose Portrait or Landscape, depending upon which way the picture is oriented. If the image is wider than it is tall, you'll want to choose Landscape. When it all looks right, click OK.

Size the Image

Now comes the tricky bit. Ordinarily, you'd next go to the Print menu item, but we're going to choose File, Print Multiple Images instead. If you've never printed more than one picture on a page, you may be unfamiliar with this obscure little feature, but it's perfect for what we want to do.

You should now see a new screen that displays your picture in a pane on the left and a big print canvas on the right. Drag the image from the left onto the page. Then grab the lower right corner of the picture and drag it to resize the image on the page. Note that a small status display in the very bottom right corner of the screen keeps you apprised of the image's exact print size. Using that display, you can adjust the image until it's exactly the right size for printing.

Keep in mind, of course, that you may still need to crop your photo to get it to fit--most digital images don't have the same proportion as 35mm film (on which 5-by-7 and 8-by-10 prints are based) and so you may need to cut away a bit at your picture's length until it's about the right format for 8-by-10 printing.

When you're happy with the picture's position and size on the page, just choose File, Print, and the image will be sent to the printer. That's all there is to it!