Printing Tips

Look at the images used by today’s advertisers to sell their products or services and you will see one very important factor. The visuals used to sell are rarely product shots. Advertisers today use illustrative photography that evoke emotions and desires. It is designed to show consumers how the product or service will affect their lives. Advertisers want to tell consumers what their lifestyles could & should be. Through photography, they want to show how the service or product they are promoting can improve quality of life, save time, or provide more security or excitement in their lives. They appeal not to the mind, but to the emotions. Keep that in mind when you are brainstorming your next commercial shoot.

More tips........

SIZE IS EVERYTHING

The relationship between megapixels and print size is key to your choice of camera.

Before you think about editing & printing your images, it’s worth giving some consideration to your digital camera, since capture is the first stage in the production pipeline. The camera generates the raw materials that you’ll be working with in your photo editing software and the computing acronym GIGO-Garbage In, Garbage Out- applies perfectly to the process of producing prints. If the initial shot has a low resolution or is heavily compressed, then it’s going to be difficult if not impossible to produce good-quality prints or digital images at a large size. A digital camera’s capacity to capture image data is measured in megapixels: the higher the cameras megapixel rating, the more information will be contained in images for your software, and your printer, to work with, so the better quality will be at a given size. You will find some compact cameras boast the same megapixel value as digital SLR’s, but if your serious about photography, an SLR’s superior lens will give it the edge in term of image quality.

PICK THE RIGHT PRINTER & PAPER

There are many different printing options available, each with its advantages and disadvantages.

To get the best print quality you should use photo paper in conjunction with a printer that supports such paper. Photo paper and photo printers are more expensive than document oriented A4 Inkjet printers. Choose the printer by evaluating how many prints you will make and how important quality is to you. If you print occasionally for fun an Inkjet printer with normal or photo paper is probably good enough for you. If you print a lot and quality is very important photo paper with a photo printer is the way to go. As a rule of thumb glossy photo paper provides the best quality for color photo prints while matte photo paper provides the best quality for black and white prints.

Editing your photos:

Make sure that you print exactly the photo that you want printed. Using simple photo editing tools (such as Photoshop or even Windows built-in Paint application) you can crop a photo to include just the area you are interested in or crop out parts which you do not want in the print. For example you took a photo of a group of friends but on the left corner of the photo there is a bystander that just happened to be there. You can crop the photo to include only your friends and thus effectively eliminate the unwanted object from the print.

When cropping photos always remember aspect-ratio – depending on the paper and the printer you’re using sometimes you’re limited to a certain photo size. For example if you print on a special 4X6 photo paper any source photo that is not in a 4X6 aspect ratio will have to be either stretched, cropped or parts of the print will be left blank. Make sure that you crop your photo to fit a specific aspect ratio if you’re printing on a specific aspect-ratio paper.

More photo processing can be done in order to enhance your prints. It can include red-eye removal (many software packages will do it for you automatically) contrast enhancement and more. For example if a portion of the photo that is important to you is a bit dark – you can “stretch” the color palette in a way that this section will look more lit and detailed. This will usually be on the expense of “overexposing” other portions of the photo that you care less about.