How to Print Photos

Printing your photos at home is easy and can allow you to save money and have more control over the final picture. For best results, use photo paper and a photo printer. This page is a guide on how to print photos.

Printing your photos at home is easy and can allow you to save money and have more control over the final picture. For best results, use photo paper and a photo printer. This page is a guide on how to print photos.

• Printing your photos on a printer connected to your computer can be cheaper and easier than developing and printing them in a store. You can print both digital pictures and pictures taken on film from your computer, but you need to scan images that are not digital to your computer before printing them. If you are using film to shoot photos, you can also develop the images yourself in a darkroom. For tips on developing pictures, see Mahalo's guide on How to Develop Photos.

(Creative Commons photo by Cheon Fong Liew)

• You can print photos from any printer, using any ink and paper, but for good-quality results, you will need a photo printer, photo paper and special ink. Since you cannot print good pictures if you don't have good material to start with, you will need to take the pictures on a digital camera with a few megapixels. The more megapixels your camera has, the larger prints you can produce. Glossy photo paper provide similar texture as the standard photo paper used when printing the pictures in a store, but some people prefer the look of matte photo paper.

• Before starting to print photos at home, edit the pictures to improve the quality and crop and resize them if necessary. Before resizing pictures, learn about pixels and resolution. Pixels are information in a photo. When an image is enlarged beyond the capacity of the pixels, the pixels will look like small squares on the image. Resolution is the amount of pixels per inch. An image with more pixels per inch (ppi) will have a higher resolution. Enlarging a picture can reduce the quality of it, as it decreases the ppi.

• After purchasing the equipment you need and editing the images, you are ready to print the photos. Place the photo paper in the printer and choose a landscape or portrait format depending on the image. You are then ready to print the image.

• To print photos at home, start by purchasing a printer, photo paper and photo iink, if you don't have it already. Edit and resize the images if necessary before printing them.

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• Introduction
• Step 1: What You Need
• Step 2: Editing Photos
• Step 3: Printing Photos
• Conclusion