Chapter 18: Working with Graphics

Turning Images into Prints

A digital image file is convenient in many ways, but it's not very satisfying to carry one around in your wallet. For some purposes you still can't beat printing a picture on paper. An ordinary color printer can produce adequate pictures, especially if you use paper made for photographs. If you print a lot of photos and want high quality, you can get a special photo printer. Or, you can send your image files to a photo shop to be printed. You can even use the Online Print Ordering Wizard to order your prints over the Web.

Printing Your Pictures at Home

You can use any local or network printer to print your pictures. The quality of your prints depends on three factors:

• The image file Paper is a more demanding medium than a computer monitor. Flaws in your pictures that don't seem significant on the screen are much more visible when you print. A rule of thumb is that you need about 2 million pixels (2 megapixels) to make a high-quality 50xd77 print, and about 3 million to make an 80xd710.
• The printer Printers that do a perfectly good job on documents may not be adequate for pictures. A good general-purpose color printer will print your photographs reasonably well, but won't rival the prints you get from a photo shop. If you want photo-shop quality, you need a special photo printer.
• The paper Paper makes a huge difference in printing photos, particularly if you have an ink-jet printer. Ink spreads as it soaks into low-quality paper, and that makes your pictures fuzzy. You can find good photographic paper at any camera store.

Windows includes a Photo Printing Wizard to help you print your pictures. Start the Wizard in any of these three ways:

• Right-click the icon of an image file in an Explorer window and choose Print from the shortcut menu,
• Select an image file in an Explorer window and choose Print This Picture from the Picture Tasks area on the Task pane, or
• Display an image with the Windows Picture And Fax Viewer and click the Print button on the toolbar.

The Photo Printing Wizard leads you through a process of selecting which pictures to print, choosing a printer (or installing one if none is installed), setting the number of copies to make of each picture, selecting print size, and laying out the pictures on the pages you print. Figure 18-7 shows how the Wizard arranges pictures on a sheet of paper.

Figure 18-7: The Photo Printing Wizard arranges your pictures to use each sheet of paper efficiently.

Ordering Prints of Your Pictures via the Web

The most obvious way to get photo-shop quality prints is to order them from a photo shop. Many photo shops will print your pictures if you bring in a disk, but you can also use the Online Print Ordering Wizard to order prints from an online photo service. The Wizard leads you through the process of selecting the pictures you want, then connects you with one of several online photo-printing services so that you can complete your order. The cost of the prints (plus a shipping fee) is charged to your credit card, and the prints are mailed to you or delivered by a courier service.

To order prints online, first assemble the pictures you want printed in a single folder. Then open that folder and select Order Prints Online from the Picture Tasks section of the Task pane. (We don't know of any way to start this Wizard if you don't have the Task pane displayed.)

The Wizard leads you through the following steps: selecting which pictures in this folder you want printed, choosing a printing service, and connecting you to that service. (You probably will have to choose between Kodak and Fuji, and all the prices we checked were the same.) You select the number and size of prints you want, give a mailing address and a credit card number. The image files are then uploaded to the service's computer.

Digital image files can be large, and upload speeds are not that fast. Even using a DSL Internet connection, it took us 10 minutes to upload 15 pictures taken with a 3.3 megapixel camera.

Kodak also has an excellent photo-sharing and -printing service on the Web. Go to http://www.ofoto.com to sign up. As of fall 2001, you get 15 free prints when you open an Ofoto account.