In this guide I’ll show you how to get the best digital photography printing by properly setting up your home printer.
The best printer in the world will produce lousy results if a little
care isn’t taken over printer setup. Or, to look at it another way,
even an average printer can produce great results with the proper set
up.
The equipment
I’ll assume you already have a “photo” printer, some good quality
printer paper, good ink in your printer and a great digital photography
image to print.
Now, lets concentrate on getting that printer of yours set up.
First you will need to open your digital photo image in your editing
software (Photoshop?, or Paint Shop?). If you don’t have any special
software, and you’re using Windows XP then you probably have Microsoft
Photo Editor, or Microsoft Paint already installed. Either of these
will do just fine.
Once your image is open, and edited if needed, you’re ready to start your digital photography printing! Go to the “file” menu and select “print”. A dialogue box will pop up, looking something like the one below. Click on the "Properties…" button:
The screenshot below shows what you will see next.
This will vary between printer manufacturers. The controls are all the
same, they just sometimes have different names.
The two boxes you will need are marked in the screenshot by the two arrows:
Media Type – this tells the printer what
type of paper you are going to use. It may also be called Paper Type,
Paper Select or something similar.
Print Quality – this tells the
printer how much care you want it to take over your print. The more
care it takes, the better the print. It will also take longer to print,
and use more ink. Unfortunately that can’t be helped if you’re after
the best quality digital photography printing.
Next you will need to change the selections in the paper box and the print quality boxes. Use the drop down arrow (marked by red arrow 1a in the screenshot below) to choose your paper.
You should be using coated photo paper for good quality
digital photography printing, so choose that from the list of papers
available. In my example, the best paper selectable is "high resolution
paper".
For the best digital photography printing you
need to make sure you have set the print quality to it’s highest
setting. In my example (red arrow 2) it is labeled “high”. Yours might say something like “best” or “fine”. Whatever it’s called, choose the best one available.
Right, so you’re all set . . . no! Don’t press print yet! There’s one last thing to set.
It won’t affect the quality of your digital photography
printing, but it will save you paper. Have a look at the “page setup”
tab at the top of the dialog box. Here you can set the paper
orientation to be “portrait” or “landscape”. Choose the one that
matches your digital photo image.
If you don’t check this is correct you may well
end up printing a landscape photograph in portrait mode. One side will
be cut off. I know, I’ve done it on more than a few occasions!
Finally – don’t forget to remove any cheap plain paper from
your printer and load your more expensive photo paper before hitting
the print button. My advice is to only load and print one sheet of
paper at a time. If you put a stack of paper in the printer they
sometimes get stuck.
Top Tip!
Now you know how to set up your printer for top quality
digital photography printing, here’s one last tip for the cautious
amongst you. Before you print your final image, change those paper and
ink settings to their lowest (i.e. “plain paper” and “draft quality”).
Then print a test image on cheap plain paper. This uses far
less ink than the top quality setting, and if it doesn’t look good, you
won’t have wasted a sheet of photo paper either. Just remember to
change the settings back to top quality once the good paper goes into
the printer!
