How can I make prints from my digital camera images?

Digital cameras encourage people to take more pictures than ever before, yet as the minilabs and processing companies will tell, we don't print all those pictures. One of the biggest obstacles that new digital camera owners have to overcome is how to get photo prints like they used to from their film camera. To ensure that other people see the efforts of your photo skills then you need to print some of your pictures. Fortunately advances in cameras, printers and software have made it easier than ever before to be able to quickly print your digital pictures and share around a "bunch of prints" just as in the days of film. This article will help you complete the photo experience with prints.

The one thing that's new for digital photographers is choice; film cameras pretty much relied on the people taking their film to the processing store for printing. With digital this is still possible, but there are a few other options that you might want to try.

• Printing with a photo capable printer connected to your computer
• Printing direct from your camera to an increasing range of direct printers
• Sending your pictures over the internet to an online printing service

Print at home (or in the office)

Often considered to be the main way to get prints for digital cameras. Most people have a computer, and mostly a colour printer connected to it. The photo quality of most modern inkjets is very good expecially when used with the better photo papers and inks. For small sizes, 10x15cm (6x4 inch) it may well be cheaper at a minilab prices today seem to be around 25 to 30 EURO cents for a print, however for larger 13x18cm (5x7 inch) sizes the pendulum swings back in the direction of the printer at home. The benefit of printing at home is that you have complete control, wehther you use Adobe Photoshop, or utilities such as Canon's Easy Photo Print, with most of the recent models of PIXMA and Bubble Jet printers, to get your prints.

Print direct

You can print your pictures direct to many printers, from most PowerShot and Digital EOS cameras using PictBridge. The Japanese Camera and Imaging Products Association [CIPA] issued a press release on 3rd February 2003 announcing the creation of the PictBridge standard. Canon, HP, Epson, Fuji, Olympus and Sony originally supported the creation of the standard, though now most brands of camera and printer are PictBridge compliant. PictBridge enables a camera to connect to a printer, and then they share each of their capabilities and the camera LCD displays the common options. Typically this is print size, cropping, paper types etc. Using the familiar camera menus makes it simply to get prints without even switching a computer on. Virtually all recent Canon cameras have included a Print button that lights up blue when a PictBridge printer is attached the camera. PictBridge printers connect to the camera with the cameras' regular USB cable.
In the past Canon had it's own standards called Direct Print and Bubble Jet direct, and older cameras support these instead of PictBridge. If you have a Canon printer - even a recent one - and an older Canon camera it will most likely still work. Of course Canon's compact Selphy printers make ideal direct prints, even some professionals use them for digital equivalent of Polaroids. Most of the Canon cameras launched in 2003 can be updated to support PictBirdge if they don't out of the box. Canon's firmware updates are available here.

Print online

There's many online print services who will help you to send your images to them for printing. Sevices, prices and ease of use vary from one company to the next, but a quick search will find several options for wherever in the world you happend to live. In the past we've used the services of Colormailer.com in Switzerland, and Photobox.co.uk in the UK. One option for many European and Japanese residents is Canon's own online album service - CANON iMAGE GATEWAY. This gives you 100MB online album, and let's you share images and make prints.

Print at your local minilab

Remember film - the old processing store you used to drop the rolls off to for printing can - in many cases - now make prints from your digital images. For extreme simplicity some stores will simply accept your cameras memory card and then you can order the images from the screen in store. Alternatively you can copy images from your camera to a CD or DVD disk and take that in. You can expect the familiar types of services, and maybe you can have your 100's of prints ready for you in the hour.

Recommended resolutions for printing

How many megapixels do you need to make a reasonable print?
Often people take the resolution of their printer, and divide it in to the image pixel sizes to work out the size of the print; so a 4800dpi PIXMA printer, would print the 16.7MP images from an EOS-1Ds Mark II (4992 x 3328 pixels) at around 1" x 0.7" (2.6 x 1.8 cm). Yet professionals use this camera to make much larger prints. The reality is that print resolutions as low as 150dpi will yield great prints, that same EOS-1Ds Mark II image grows to 33" x 22" (84 x 56cm). A lot of magazines base their selection criteria around 300dpi printing, though the print resolution depends on the type of printing process. To make life as straightforward as possible we have the table below for recommended resolution and print sizes.

Copyright
PowerShot User website content and images are the property of PowerShot User and subject to copyright 1998-2010. Images submitted to Picture of the Day and Picture of the Week are the property of the named photographer.

Disclaimer
The PowerShot User website is the work of an enthusiastic owner of Canon's digital cameras, it is not funded or supported by Canon.
PowerShot, IXUS, IXY and EOS are registered trademarks of Canon Inc. All other trademarks acknowledged.

Linking
We do not permit direct linking to the images contained within this site. This is to protect us from bandwidth theft, and to protect the submitted pictures of our visitors. We are happy for other sites to link to the PowerShot User site, we recommend that the index www.benel.com/powershot/ is the best for this purpose.