|
Printing
After you have taken your digital camera photo with your snapshot digital camera or digital SLR camera, you need to show it around for your satisfaction and for the enjoyment of your loved ones. This involves printing your digital camera photo. You have two options here. First, you use a professional photo lab where you can have it printed. Second, you can do-it-yourself at home. If you cannot afford a decent printer, and you want a professional looking print, then you should use the services of a professional photo lab.
Professional photo lab printing
All photo labs provide the service of printing digital files taken by a digital camera or a scanner. After you have previewed the photos in your digital camera, and removed the unacceptable photos, you can hand over the digital camera or the memory card to the photo lab for printing. You can also use the services of the photo booths appearing at many photo print service providers, where you can preview your photos, enhance and crop them before giving it to the lab for printing. You can also load them to your laptop and use the photo editing software provided by the digital camera manufacturer, make necessary corrections to the photos and then burn a CD and give the CD to the photo lab for printing. You can also email the photos to the lab and get them courier the prints back to you.
You need to have a nice relationship with the lab staff, as you will be at the mercy of the printing machine and the operator, and the result may not be as you intended it to be. You may have to take a few retries before you get a final good result. Lab prints are normally printed on normal photo paper so the same feel and durability as a traditional film print can be obtained. To get the best result out of the lab, you must know what machine they use and 'profile' their printing machine and then incorporate that profile data in your digital photo files to ensure a smooth and quality print.
Home based printing
If you do not have the time to use the services of a professional photo lab, you can always print your digital camera photos at your home. For this, you need a printer. Nowadays, many printers are designed to work with digital cameras. They can be connected directly using USB connection like PictBridge or by direct connection via company-specific software if it is the same brand of printer as the digital camera. Many printers also allow memory card readers by which memory cards can be plugged in and prints can be made directly from the memory cards.
Ink-jet printers are available as 3-color printers (CMY) using Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow inks which are sprayed in a fine pattern of minute dots very close together so as to obtain all different shades of colors. A greater density of black is obtained by using a 4-color printer (CMYK) where K stands for black ink, which is added. For more subtle variations in tones, a 6-color printer can be used which besides CMYK also add Light Cyan and Light Magenta inks. Recent printers have also developed extra colors like Red, Blue, and metallic shades (Gold, Silver, Copper, Bronze, Iron) to achieve superior prints, by increasing the color gamut, which can adequately match the superior color gamut produced by digital cameras. You can buy any printer that suits your needs and budget and achieve a better result than professional lab printing, if you use your printer along with a photo editing software and specially coated inkjet papers or photographic papers.
To avoid jagged edges in case you have enlarged your image, your can increase the resolution, which increases the number of pixels in the picture by inserting new pixels between the original ones. This is known as interpolation. You must remember, that the best print is possible only if you take the best digital photo. Hence, any photo editing software cannot put in the detail, which is not fine in the original photo. You must take high quality digital camera photos to ensure high quality digital photo prints.
Online Printing Services:
|
