How to Prepare Your Printer for Photo Printing

Impeccable photos don’t only depend on a good shoot or great Photoshop skills. Printing devices play a big role on faultless prints. To assist your photo printing process the following are five steps you can take to prepare your printer and give it some TLC and in return it will print out the best pictures of your life. 

Printer Preparations Steps:

Step 1: Keep Printer Driver Updated – In order for your printer and your computer have the best communication they need a printer driver. Such printer drivers are constantly being revised by Printer Manufacturers and it is a good idea before printing photos to check your printer brand’s website to download updates.

Step 2: Printer Settings Changed to Best Quality – You need to make sure your settings are the best for photo printing. The best place to see how to change print quality settings is your printers owner’s manual. It is important you use the highest possible color printing resolution because the greater the dpi (dots per inch) the better your prints will be. Depending on the printer you might have bonus features such as automatic contrast or smoothing adjustments.

Step 3: Paper Settings for Photo Paper – You already know how to change your printer settings and there you can also choose the type of paper to be used. Best results are found obviously using high gloss paper and the printer needs to know you are using it to increase the amount of ink and touch ups required for flawless prints. If you set this up from the start you will definitely save yourself from poor quality results and save paper and ink on the process.

Step 4: Verify you have Printer Ink- All of the above will be worthless if you don’t have plenty of printer ink available. Make sure you check your ink levels and see if you have enough for the type and size of photograph you are about to print. If you choose to change the cartridge prior to printing it is important to align the cartridges and run a printing test.

Step 5: Photo Test – Organized printing isn’t easy but it helps you keep frustration out of the process. A good idea is to reduce the size of your photos and add them on a single sheet of photo paper. Make this your test sheet and then use the small photos to keep in your wallet, make magnets, send on a letter or make a collage.

Photo Printing Most Common Mistakes

Printing Photos yourself means instant gratification and you can print what you want, when you want. BUT yes of course there are common mistakes that sometimes cost you more than if you had send the pictures to print professionally.

Knowing what those common mistakes are is very important because that gives you a head start on how to avoid them and thus print perfect photos. Before we start it is important to remember that great photos are proportional to the type and amount of printer ink available for printing. To avoid photo printing mistakes rule number one is to have plenty of ink on your ink cartridge and toner cartridge .

Getting back to our main topic. The most common mistakes people make when printing their photos are:

1. Low Resolution - The way an image looks on screen could be nice but have very low resolution which will in turn print poorly on photo paper.

2. Wrong Size - A very common mistake is using the wrong size paper for the photo size you are printing.

3. Wrong Side - Printing on the wrong side of the paper is a very common and costly mistake. Photo paper is not know for it's cheap cost.

4. No Test Print - Just because it looks good in the screen it doesn't mean its going to come out exactly that way. Always do a test print in draft mode on a regular paper or recycled paper.

5. Printing on High Resolution - HP printers , some Canon printers and Lexmark printers have an option not to choose Photo Paper at the time of printing. If you choose that what happens basically is the printer uses up your black ink cartridge. What should happen is that when choosing the Photo Paper option the printer uses a black created by mixing the other colors or in some Canon printers using the alternative black which is a dye ink and not a pigmented ink.

6. No INK - LIke we said before a very common mistake could be not enough ink or clogged print heads make it impossible to print perfect photos.

What type of images print the best?

It is well know that what looks great on your monitor doesn’t necessarily print that way. Especially if we are talking about images, so the following are some tips for better image printing:

* When you are scanning the images from photographs it is better to save them in either tif, or eps format. These image formats will preserve the colour and sharpness of your pictures the best.

* File formats like gif or jpg compress the pictures colour and pixel resolution and this can cause color shifts and blurriness. Since jpg and gif are the most predominant image formats on the web, it follows that it's not a good idea to simply lift an image from someone's website and use it in your layout.

* You should scan your images using a resolution of 300dpi at the final dimensions you intend to use them so that your colors will look smooth, and hard objects will look sharp. In other words don't scan at 300dpi and then enlarge the picture by 200% in your layout program!

* If you are using pictures from your digital camera they will work just fine if they are jpgs; the quality of jpg images from digital cameras seems to be much better than jpgs that are used on the web. You must do the math to make sure that it is high enough in pixel resolution though. For instance, if your camera puts out a typical image of 1280 x 960 pixels at 72dpi you get about 17" x 13" of photograph (at 72dpi); this is the same amount of detail as an image which is 4" x 3" at 300dpi so it's safe to reduce or enlarge that image in Publisher up to about 4" x 3" in dimension. 

 * Use photo ink when possible.  For photo printers there are specific ink cartridges that are specifically manufactured to make photos and images last longer.  Look for the best prices on photo printer ink in our website Inkjetsuperstore Canada

Christmas Cards Printing Tips

Continuing with our Christmas Countdown learn the best tips to print the best Holiday cards this season. Nowadays you can find many Christmas Card Templates online this article is aimed at giving you the ins and outs of card printing. Are you ready? Let's start:

Tip 1: Pick the Right Paper - The secret to printing the best card to look store bought is to get greeting card paper stocks that are 14-point gloss cover stock. The 13-point recycled matte, which has a softer sheen for a more thoughtful approach and is also eco-friendly to satisfy your green agenda.

Tip 2: Printer Settings and Draft- The secret to perfect printing is making sure your printing settings and printer mode have been correctly adjusted once that is set then print a draft card on regular paper or used paper to make sure the margins are fine and ready to print.

Tip 3: Printer Ink- After doing the previous steps the last thing you need to make sure is that you have plenty of ink to print your Christmas cards. How do you know how much printer ink you have left? Most printers have a servicing option and also the ability to tell the "estimate ink level" check your printer manual for more info.

Ready to print? Hope so and to save even more this week find great deals at Inkjetsuperstore.ca

Tips to Save time when Printing

We know that time is money and we want to give you along with great savings on ink & toner cartridges, ways to save on time. Because we don't always need to print on draft mode or printing pictures is an exception rather than the rule. The question then is; Do you find yourself adjusting your printer settings a lot? If your answer is yes, then we've got a great tip for you!

Instead of changing settings back and forth all the time, install your printer a second time - with different settings. Once you do that all you need to do is select the version that you need from the print dialog box. It is definitely a lot faster.Here are the steps:

1) To install your printer twice, just go to the Printers folder under your Start button, Settings, Printers (for XP users under Control Panel)

2) Click the Add Printer icon and install the printer as you normally would. You should be able to pick your printer from the list the wizard provides and not look for it all around your driver disks.

IMPORTANT - you can install the same printer twice without any problems.

3) When it comes time to name the printer give it a different name, probably more descriptive like "Draft HP" or "Color HP" and you can rename the original printer if you like.

4) Last but not least, while you're still in the Printers folder, put in your custom settings for each printer by Right-clicking the printer you want to modify and selecting Properties from the resulting menu. This is where you set the printers up for color, draft, etc. The procedure varies from printer to printer, but it's never to hard.

5) Printing time!