Preparing your photos for printing

Printing your photos in the old days from film required absolutely no input from the average user. That is mostly due to the fact that the photographic labs prepared your photos for you and only the professionals bothered with developing and printing their images. With the arrival of cheap digital cameras almost everyone has a camera and because we don’t need to buy film we actually take much more photos than people use to take when we still used film. This has put an enormous strain on photographic labs who now can’t keep up with individually processing each photo before sending it to the printer.

There are however still some labs who do this for their customers for free but the person doing the processing probably isn’t as qualified as the people we had some years back working with film. If the lab you are using charges you for this service as an extra it is usually worth paying for until you are confident enough to prepare your own photos for printing.

The first thing we need to do is to calibrate our monitor. If your monitor isn’t calibrated you are most likely going to get mixed results which will frustrate anybody beyond belief. Once your monitor is calibrated we can actually see the colors we are going to get. The other important thing we need to do is sharpening.

Sharpening photos for print is an art within itself. Chances are that if you just heard about sharpening your photos before printing that you will create a very bad mess. Most articles I have read about the subject usually suggest you sharpen more than what you think you should because the print won’t be as sharp as what you see on your screen. That is true but people who are new to this tend to go over the top.

When sharpening a photo we must take into account the size at which we will be printing. For example we are going to look at a normal 4x6 print. We can’t just sharpen a 12 megapixel photo and expect it to print perfectly. We have to resize our Image to an optimum size. Most printers don’t exceed 300 DPI so we will start with that. To get a 4x6 inch image at 300 DPI we must resize it to 1800x1200 pixels. Hopefully you have a 4x6 inch photo by your side so that you can press it up to the screen to set the image magnification on screen to match the size of an actually 4x6 image.

Now we can sharpen our image until it looks good but not overdone. I actually suggest you make a few duplicates of one image with different sharpening levels and print them at your local lab to see which you prefer.

Happy Shooting!