25 TOP IDEAS FOR IDEAL PICTURE PRINTS
1. Select wisely
If you’re prepared to restrict your print size to A4, it makes good sense to purchase a multi-purpose printer that benefits producing both photos and documents. Canon’s latest 5-ink and 6-ink printers blaze a trail for multi-purpose A4 printing, with the PIXMA TS6250 and PIXMA TS8250, respectively. They’re fast and produce excellent-quality colour pictures. For a similarly multi-purpose option in A3-format printing, the Epson EcoTank ET-7750 is a good choice, with its high-capacity ink tanks.
2. Go big
For larger-format printing, A3+ or ‘Super A3’ has an optimum print size of 19x13in (483x329mm). That’s noticeably larger than standard A3, and the element ratio is a better fit for the 3:2 format of a lot of electronic cameras. There’s a series of Canon and Epson models to pick from (see above and the following pages), or you could take a bigger step up to an A2 printer, such as the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 and Epson SureColor SC-P800. These can create picture prints that are twice the size of A3, at 23.4 × 16.5 in (594x420mm), but they don’t come low-cost.
3. Direct printing
Most multi-function or ‘all-in-one’ printers include a PictBridge memory, wi-fi and port card slot, so they can print pictures directly from suitable cams or sd card without the requirement to use a computer. It can be useful if you require quick prints on the fly.
4. Display your screen
WYSIWYG sounds fantastic but, all frequently, what you see on screen won’t match what you get on paper. The usual perpetrator is that the screen is set with too expensive a brightness level and needs turning down a bit. For supreme accuracy, buy a monitor-calibration tool like the Datacolor Spyder5 Express.
5. Crop creatively
Unless you’re shooting with a 3:2 element ratio electronic camera and printing on 6x4in postcard-sized image paper, you’ll frequently discover that your image files have a various element ratio to the paper you’re printing on. Rather than simply losing an automated amount off the bottom and leading or sides of the print, crop your image artistically so that it looks its best when printed on paper.
6. Faster or better?
The ‘typical’ quality setting in your printer’s settings should show adequate when developing postcard-sized prints. It must also allow a good turn of speed, with each print only taking a matter of seconds to complete. For A4 or larger prints, it can be worth choosing the best-quality setting, as prints can look marginally sharper, and have a little better tonal meaning and smoother graduations, although they’ll take longer to output.
7. Get set
Guarantee you choose the right kind of paper in the printer residential or commercial properties or preferences dialog box. Colour accuracy and overall print quality is critically depending on this. You can wind up with awful-looking outcomes if the settings are wrong.
8. Auto fix
Particularly when printing photos straight from your electronic camera or memory cards, the ‘vehicle repair’ or ‘photo enhance’ alternative readily available in the majority of printers can help to optimise print quality without the requirement for applying manual modifying or corrections.
9. Don’t dry out
If you have a professional picture printer that you only use occasionally, it’s a great idea to switch it on at least as soon as a week. A mini cleansing cycle will most likely be activated, but you might also produce a print on a plain sheet of paper; it utilizes a little of each colour ink. This assists to avoid ink drying in the nozzles of the print head over a time period, which can be very hard to clear, even with successive running of the print-head cleansing regular or a ‘deep clean’ cycle.
10. Colour management
A lot of times, you must find that you get great outcomes with your printer’s colour management set to ‘car’. Nevertheless, this can use improvements which might make your picture prints look over-saturated in colour, or expensive on the other hand. Specifically if you’ve modified your photos, utilize the manual, basic colour setting or assign colour management to your modifying program rather than let the printer have control.
11. Paper chase
Shiny image prints aren’t the only way to show your images. Semi-gloss or lustre papers are an excellent alternative, matt papers work really well for pigment-based printers, and there’s a wide variety of ‘art’ documents on the marketplace, including the likes of canvas effect and image rag. If you experiment with various media, you’ll find that you can produce actually distinctive-looking prints.
12. Get lined up
When you purchase and set up a new printer, it’s an excellent idea to run a print-head alignment regimen. This will make sure that you get the sharpest possible prints, with minimum degradation from ink droplets being misaligned. It deserves repeating the treatment every six months or two, and after carrying the printer to a different area.
13. Nozzle check
Particularly before creating a large-format inkjet print of A3+ or A2 size, it’s worth running a nozzle check regimen. This will create a test print that you can examine for quality. If you see any faint lines throughout the print, it’s likely that a few of the nozzles in the print head are blocked. Run a head-cleaning cycle and repeat the test, to prevent squandering the cost of a big sheet of photo paper and accompanying ink.
14. Dye or pigment?
Specialist picture printers of A3+ or bigger formats tend to run on either pigment-based or dye-based inks. Pigment-based inks tend to be more robust for printing on matt paper, but normally do not have the super-smooth finish and consistent reflectivity of dye-based inks on glossy paper.
15. It’s in the edit
It’s worth putting some effort into making them look their finest if you’re creating prints to last a lifetime. A little care at the modifying stage can go a long way. At the minimum, you need to use any necessary corrections for brightness, contrast and colour rendition.
16. Transport system
The paper transportation system can become unclean after a long period of time, which can deteriorate print quality. Some printers have a regular that you can run for cleaning the paper course, available from the upkeep section of the printer properties dialog box.
17. Finest resolutions
A printing resolution of 300dpi (dots per inch) is something of an industry requirement, but a lower resolution of 150dpi can however yield great outcomes, specifically when utilizing an inkjet printer. As a rough guide, a 3MP (megapixel) image is sufficient for developing an A4 print, and a 6MP image is enough for an A3 print. A lot of existing digital cams have far greater megapixel counts anyway, so you shouldn’t have any issues even when ordering poster-sized prints from a lab.
18. Decompress
It can be tempting to use aggressive compression settings when saving JPEG files, so that they use up less room on your disk drive or other electronic storage, as well as being quicker to upload to the web or send to individuals through email. Nevertheless, this can result in undesirable compression artefacts and a destruction of quality that’s more noticeable in printed pictures than on screen.
19. Throughout the border
When creating borderless prints, you’ll lose a small amount around the edges of your image owing to the print overlapping the location of the paper. You can usually pick the quantity of extension and minimize it to reduce the loss, but be careful not to wind up with a thin white line along any of the edges. Likewise remember that borderless printing is not suitable for plain paper or matt photographic paper.
20. Mono magic
Typical A4 photo printers run on 6 inks at the most, and don’t have additional grey inks. An outcome of this is that mono picture prints can do not have clearness and contrast, along with suffer from unwanted colour casts. For optimum mono quality, it’s worth updating to an A3+ picture printer that’s developed to excel at white and black in addition to colour printing.
21. Test prints
Flaws that you can’t see on screen can be visible in small-format prints. Before developing a large-format print, try a small 6x4in photo and examine it for problems. It likewise gives you a great concept of how the contrast, colour and brightness will search in your final large-format print.
22. Keep it genuine
Everyone likes a deal and you can conserve a stack of cash by purchasing cheap, non-genuine ink cartridges and photo paper. However, you run the risk of impurities obstructing the nozzles in your print heads and you’ll frequently find that colour accuracy and total print quality are significantly inferior. In some tests, we found that inkjet picture prints produced with cheap consumables started to noticeably fade after just a couple of weeks, when they should last for decades.
23. Conserve money
A better method to save cash on your printing expenses is to buy high- capacity cartridges. Some printers have the accessibility of XL and even XXL cartridges, as an alternative to standard-capacity choices. These will generally offer large cost savings, specifically for printing photos which tend to use much more ink than general colour documents.
24. Save ink
Some of Epson’s range-topping, pigment-based printers utilize the exact same channel in the print head for image black and matt black. Each time you swap between these two alternative cartridges, you’ll lose a significant quantity of ink, as the channel requires to be purged and recharged before printing. Attempt for that reason to decrease the number of times you change between glossy and matt media as much as possible with these printers.
25. Supersize your prints
Even A3+ photo prints can look a bit lost when held on the wall. Instead of creating your own large-format prints, it can be better to utilize a premium online lab, such as Loxley Colour or Whitewall. You’ll need to wait on your prints to show up in the post, but you can create much larger prints and get extra options, like boxed canvas and acrylic prints.
For A4 or bigger prints, it can be worth selecting the best-quality setting, as prints can look marginally sharper, and have a little much better tonal meaning and smoother graduations, although they’ll take longer to output.
As a rough guide, a 3MP (megapixel) image is sufficient for producing an A4 print, and a 6MP image is enough for an A3 print. When developing borderless prints, you’ll lose a small quantity around the edges of your image owing to the print overlapping the location of the paper. You run the threat of pollutants clogging the nozzles in your print heads and you’ll typically find that colour accuracy and total print quality are vastly inferior. You’ll have to wait for your prints to turn up in the post, however you can produce much larger prints and get extra choices, like boxed canvas and acrylic prints.
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