For all those mortals who simply want to hang a photo of ourselves on the wall, or make an album, poster, etc., the seemingly simple moment of trying to print our perfect images can be very frustrating. Because maybe we don’t know much about printing photos, but we have been lovingly retouching the image, we love its tones, its contrast and the composition that we have achieved after a lot of work. Everything is perfect and we can’t wait to see what it looks like on our wall. We put the images on a USB and we go to the nearest printing center, and that’s where the drama begins. They tell us about pixels per inch or per centimeter, dimensions, finishes … and we have no idea, we see how they touch the photo, they cut it here or there to fit the size of the frame, or we have white borders that we did not have and, to top it off, when they give us the copies, the colors have nothing to do with what we saw on the computer screen. In short, a drama. Nor is it that we are experts on the subject, but a minimum, right? It would be nice to have them. In this article I will try to make printing your images go from being something dramatic to something much more pleasant. Shall we see it? Or you can click Stampa foto online to help you for the best photo online.
CAMERA SETTINGS
To get good quality paper copies, you have to start the process much earlier, even before you get the photo.
Shoot with the highest quality : It is important to always work at the highest quality allowed by the camera, then you are always in time to crop, compress, etc.
Set the color space to sRGB : It is the color space that stores the most color information.
Shoot in RAW : Stores more information and allows you to make better adjustments to the image processing.
COLOUR
This is the reason why the photo on your screen has nothing to do with your paper copy, even if you are printing at home, because each device has its own color profile, which means that each device interprets the colors to your way. It is perhaps, for the amateur, the most complex part of printing, because it introduces a lot of quite complicated concepts if what you are looking for is absolute perfection.
For the simple mortal, one option is to try to unify the different color profiles of the devices involved in the image printing process, which is known as ICC color profile , especially if you print at home. Let’s say ICC profiles transmit the information of each color to each of the devices so that they interpret the colors correctly.
It is also important to have the monitor where you work with the images calibrated since, over time, it is possible that it has become out of adjustment. Do not be scared, there are programs that do it for you easily a simple and free option to do it is Quickgamma.
BASIC VOCABULARY ABOUT THE IMAGE
One of the reasons why we always fail when trying to print photos is basically because the technician at the photography store speaks a language that we do not understand. So everything starts with learning the language.
Pixel : It is the basic unit , the atom , or the cell, the set of which forms an image. Surely you have seen images with poor quality where you see a few squares throughout the image. That is pixels. You can also see them by zooming in on an image. Each pixel is of one color, and the sum of all of them gives rise to the image.
Megapixel : One Megapixel equals 1,048,576 pixels, although we commonly round to 1,000,000 pixels.
Ppi (Pixels per inch) or dpi (dots per inch) . Determines the number of pixels that will be in a given space. In this case, the more pixels, the higher the image quality. Why? Well, the space to “fill” is the same, do it with more or less pixels. If you do it with more, they remain smaller, if you do it with less, they need to “grow” to be able to occupy the same space and consequently we lose sharpness.
Inch : One inch equals 2.54 cm.
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