Printing at Your Local Camera Shop
Digital photography has made it very easy to take lots of pictures without incurring much cost. You shoot, download and sort, and print what you like. We're going to discuss printing at your local camera shop.
You do print, right?
Wait a minute. You do print your photos, right? Even though the Internet has made it easy to share your pictures via email and photo sharing sites, you should still be printing. When I worked at Wolf Camera our favorite saying was "It's not a picture unless you can hold it in your hand." How true that is.
Whether you make photo albums of your vacations or your kids, printing pictures is still an important part of digital photography.
The Simple Way
After you've shot a bunch of pictures, all you need to do is walk into your favorite camera shop, pop the memory card into a kiosk and select your images. The kiosk software makes it easy to pick what you want. You can also crop, fix redeye, select different sizes and make multiple prints of your favorite images.
The photo lab tech will apply an automatic image enhancement before printing your pictures or will make some individual adjustments. You get beautiful prints with a minimum of work on your part.
But I want more control over how my prints look
This is the category I'm in. I want my sunset photos to look a certain way. I want my flower photos to "pop". It means that I have to do all the cropping and fixing myself. I then copy all my fixed images to a USB drive to load at the kiosk. It's easier for the photo lab tech too. All they have to do is hit Print.
If you shoot pictures in your camera's RAW format you have to process and convert your images. The photo kiosks can't read RAW files. They accept JPG, TIFF or BMP. Stick with JPG files (not JPEG2000) when you convert, as it is the standard.
Basic Image Prep
Whether you use Picasa, PaintShop Pro, Photoshop Elements 5, Photoshop CS2, Lightroom or any of the 50 other photo editors out there, here's a few things you'll want to do. Consult your software's Help File if you're unclear as to how to accomplish these tasks.
- Contrast - Most programs have a single slider to change contrast. Punch it up a bit to give your picture a bit more snap. Advanced programs use Curves or Levels for this.
- Color Correction - Fix skin tones to your liking, add warmth to a sunset or make that red rose pop more. It's up to you and your tastes. Color controls in Color Balance or Levels, color filters and Hue/Saturation controls are your preferred tools.
- Crop to size - Eliminate unwanted elements in the picture. Hopefully, your software has a crop tool where you can specify the proportions. Using a crop box that's preset to 4x6 or 5x7 or 8x10 will ensure that your print is exactly what you intended it to be.
- Flatten the file - This only applies to programs that use Layers. JPG files don't support Layers, so flatten all Layers before saving out to a JPG file.
- Save as an sRGB JPG - Save (or Export in Picasa and Lightroom) your edited files to a separate folder. Use JPG quality 10 (or 90-100%) depending on your software. Some programs offer no choice. As to the sRGB color space part, if you are working from JPG's out of your P&S camera they are already there. If you use PSP, PSE or PSCS and you work in AdobeRGB you need to convert to sRGB. Most digital photo labs only recognize the sRGB color space.
If all this color space talk has you frazzled don't sweat it. It's a topic for a whole other article and only of concern to we techno geeks. As long as your pictures come out OK, just keep doing what you're doing.
All you have to do now is copy that folder full of images to a CD or USB drive and run down to the camera shop. Be sure to tell the photo lab tech to NOT adjust your pictures. You've already done that for him.
To ensure the best quality, you may want to print some test images at your local camera shop. This will help make sure that you're in sync. Also, you may want to calibrate your monitor so that what you see is what you get. This is another lengthy discussion, so I will just say that if you use Adobe PSE or PSCS it installed a little app called Adobe Gamma. It's in your Control Panel. Run it and follow the directions to get your monitor close. For optimum results you'll need to purchase a color calibration tool like the Huey or Eye One.
