Simple Photography Printing Tip

Today I am going to talk about how large or small you need to take your image for different printing purposes. Depending upon what you want to do with a photograph, you can set your camera to shoot the image at different sizes. For professional photographers, this comes naturally but for beginners, it can be a bit confusing. To simplify things, we are going to lay out how large an image needs to be to get a good print. If you are going to use your image for:

Website or email: Image should be 640 x 480
Business card: Image should be 1024 x 768
4 x 6 print: Image should be 1800 x 1200 (2 mega pixels)
5 x 7 print: Image should be 2100 x 1500 (3 mega pixels)
8 x 10 print: Image should be 2400 x 3000 (7 mega pixels)
11 x 14 plus print: Image should be 3300 x 4200 (largest possible setting)

These are some basic guidelines that you should follow to get a beautiful quality print. When you go to the menu options on your camera you should easily find the settings for image resolution.

There is another option to consider when setting your camera for the appropriate output size. There are several options for the file format but for this tip, we will discuss two file types, tiff and jpeg.

TIFF: This file format is uncompressed. Choosing TIFF means that you're always assured of getting all the image quality captured and processed by the camera. But TIFF files can be quite large, which means that only a few will fit onto a memory card. They can also take a while to be written to the card, which, with some cameras, means it might be a few seconds before you can take another picture.

JPEG: This file format is compressed, which means that the picture information is squeezed to a smaller size before it's stored on the memory card. Though this compression does not alter the photo's resolution, it does come at the expense of a slight loss of detail and clarity in the photo. Typically, a camera will offer several JPEG settings, each offering progressively more compression (which translates into being able to store more photos on the memory card), with a commensurate drop in image quality.

If you are wanting more detail and a better quality photograph, purchase extra memory cards and shoot on the tiff setting. If all you are wanting to do is put your images on the internet or print small prints, jpeg will be just fine.

So next time you go out to take pictures, consider the ultimate output of the image. Take a few minutes and make sure that your camera settings are appropriate for the type of shoot you are doing. Remember also, you can always shrink your images once you get them home. You cannot however enlarge the image once it has been shot on a lower resolution. So, if you are unsure of what you will be doing with your photographs, always shoot larger resolution and tiff format, that way you can't make a mistake.

Different Ways to Display Your Photography

I am going to let you guys in on one of my favorite ways to show off my photographs. Being that we have a photography studio and Fuji 370 professional printers, it is a little easier for us to play around with the images that come into the studio. My favorite thing to to with photographs is print them in different sizes other than the traditional 11x14, 8x10, 5x7, 4x6 and wallets. I have customers come in all the time and ask for different ideas on how to show off their new beach portraits. Well here it is. My favorite thing to do with images is print them in a square format. Take an 11x14 and make it a 12x12 or an 8x10 and make it a 10x10 or an 8x8, 5x7 looks interesting as a 5x5. Now, how do we do this? When you take your images to the local drug store or discount warehouse stores, you stick your card in and you are given the traditional options. Next time, before you just stick that card in and say print, do a little post production work. Any basic photo editing software will do. Be sure when you take your pictures, if you are planning on cropping to these unusual sizes, you leave plenty of border around your subject. Next bring the image into your software and crop it to the desired size. Next open up a new document and size it to the closest traditional size such as an 8x10 if you are wanting and 8x8 result.. Now you have two documents open, the original image(cropped to 8x8) and the new document(sized to 8x10). Take the original image and either drag and drop it or copy and paste it into the new document. Now you have an 8x8 image on an 8x10 document. Remember to make sure the dpi or resolution of both documents are the same. For example if you original photo is 72dpi then your new document needs to be the same resolution. I suggest 300 dpi for printing. Now that you have saved all of the images you want into the new documents and named them appropriately, save them on a disk, memory stick or cd and take them for printing. It would be a good idea to purchase a professional photo trimmer, prices range from around $20 up to hundreds of dollars. You can also purchase frames in these sizes or have them made at your local craft store. Now you have it, the big secret to odd sized prints.