Enjoying Digital Photography

Digital photos can be shared through email, internet photo albums, websites and memory sticks or cards. Some digital images deserve printing and framing. When printed and framed a good digital photograph makes a quality gift, a custom home decoration or a colorful addition to an office wall. Amateur photographers put their digital photography prints on greeting cards, enter photography competitions with them, and store them in print photo albums.

To print good quality digital images some basic principles need to be understood. There are two common ways of printing digital photos.  One is with an in-home inexpensive high resolution inkjet color printer. The other is with a large format printer at a retail outlet.

For quality output from a high resolution inkjet color printer, the user must select the right pixel size in the digital camera and the host computer before selecting the “print” option. Very high resolution cameras can go as high as 2592 x 1944 pixels. Printing in this resolution gives a good quality print irrespective of the small or large scale print desired. But, sometimes that amount of data may be too much for the printer. Refer to the printer manual for instructions on sizing images. An image editor can be used to convert the image to the required dots per inch  (dpi). Inkjet printers that produce good quality prints usually come with a range of dpi from 1300 to 4700. To finish the job, high quality photo print paper is widely available for the amateur photographer to use on their color inkjet printer.

The other way of printing digital photos is with large format printers. These printers usually have printing dimensions of up to 18” X 100”. There are certain printers that have even larger print widths, which are mainly used for printing posters and banners. Most camera stores have these printers and charge varying prices given the selection of print size, paper and framing options.