subject: Maximizing The Quality Of Your Home Photos [print this page] When you take a photo of your child's first birthday, or your parent's fiftieth wedding anniversary, or just a beautiful day you spent with loved ones in the park, you will want to take those photos home and print them for your scrapbook or to hang on your wall.
The first thing you want to do is make sure your photo quality is as high as it can be. The images that you print on that professional photo paper are meant to last for a lifetime of memories. You can maximize the image quality by checking the photo resolution. The higher the megapixels on your digital camera, the crisper the image will be. The newest smart phones have an eight megapixel camera. That kind of camera can produce an attractive sixteen by twenty inch print. This is actually a lot larger than your average portrait and you shouldn't really need more than that. This will ensure that your photos transfer well to your matte paper.
You will definitely want to use the correct file format when saving your pictures. Saving them as a JPEG is fine for emailing or posting on the internet on a blog, but this kind of format will compress the image and make it a little grainier than if you would save it in the larger format TIFF file. It will take up a little more space on your computer hard drive but the crispness of the image more than makes up for it.
When you finally are ready to print, you'll want to make sure that you configure the print settings properly. You want to make sure you don't skimp on the dots per inch when printing. Keep the DPI settings at 600 x 600 or higher for the best quality pictures.
Make sure you use the top quality of photo paper. Professional photo paper will provide you the best kind of photographic print and will suit any need. Definitely don't use regular paper as this will not give you a pleasing result.
Be sure to run a printer alignment before you print and run a cleaning cycle before printing important photos. This will ensure that your pictures don't have splotches, lines, or grainy smudges. You should also remember never to touch the ink and pick up the photo paper by the edges so as not to smudge the ink. If you are printing black and white, print on matte paper but color looks the best on a glossy paper or professional grade photo paper.
