Introduction
You have snapped a wonderful photo, which you think deserves to be framed. You open your photo on your computer and it looks perfectly fine on your screen, so you plug in your printer and press the print button believing you are doing the right thing. Much to your surprise, the print that comes out of the printer is absolutely not what you had expected and in right in front of you, your amazing picture has been ruined. And that happened because you didn't know the art of printing digital photo.
Yes, printing photos is an art. It's not just about plugging in a printer and pressing the print button. It takes a lot editing and adjustment before printing digital photo. That is the reason why many people turn to digital printing labs for having their digital photos printed. However, it is not something that one can't learn. If one just understands what it takes to print their photo exactly as it appears on the screen then the process can be fairly simple. If not adjusted properly the picture gets out faded and granular on the paper. For the purpose of adjustment of photo there are many different types of software that can adjust your photo prior to printing.
Printing digital photos depends on factors such as: the megapixels and size of the picture, the quality of paper, color adjustment and the quality of your printer. Megapixels mean the size of your photo per inch. This feature mainly depends on the capacity of your printer, if your printer has the capacity of printing photo with maximum 200 megapixels and you intend to print a lets 8x10 size photograph then adjust the megapixels of your picture by increasing the resolution of the picture.
If your picture has a low megapixel, try altering the size of our photo, remember if you stretch a picture with low megapixels, you will get a granular picture. Decreasing the resolution of a greater megapixel picture would result in a blurry image. Photo printing also depends a lot on the quality of the paper. Printing papers come in many forms which can be good or bad. Try choosing a thick, matte paper of a good company and avoid cheap plain paper and never use plain office paper. You can adjust the color of the photo on the picture adjusting software. The sharpness, brightness, contrast and cropping of the photo can all be adjusted via the software that you have chosen for printing photo.
Conclusion
When it comes to choosing paper, never compromise on the quality. When adjusting the color, rather than getting into the hassle of brightness and contrast adjustment use the gamma correction tool of your software. This tool would sharpen the central apart of the picture. If your software doesn't have a gamma tool, try softening the background by highlighting the picture from the centre and bringing the main subject of your photo in focus.
