Easy When You Know How
Prepare pics for printing
Photos are meant to be seen in print. When you leaf through a pile of prints you don’t need any file names, folders or metadata to tell you what they are. They bring back memories and trigger emotions. A box of prints is a box of treasure.
I’m not anti-digital photography. It lets you play with settings in real time and shoot thousands of photos without having to fork out for film, so you’ve got a better chance of bagging the shot. Trouble is, the shot then vanishes in that thumbnail quagmire on your PC (see image above). So I’ve decided to round up my best digital photos and get them printed, for posterity as well as pleasure.
But it’s easier said than done. In the good old Bonusprint days, all you had to do was chuck a film in an envelope then get a wad of great-looking 6x4in prints a week or so later. You never had to worry about resolution, except the ones you broke every January. Nowadays, to squeeze a decent print from a digital photo you have to crop it to the right dimensions; fix its resolution so it doesn’t look like pixelated porridge; replace the ink you’ve definitely used only twice; and decide whether your PC or printer should ‘choose colour’ (this gets positively hilarious if you try it on a Mac).
First, I sliced the hassle and expense in half by deciding not to print them at home. Bonusprint ( www.bonusprint.co. uk) is still around, only now it’s one of hundreds of companies who compete to print your digital photos better, faster and cheaper.
The newest arrival is Freeprints ( www. freeprintsapp.co.uk). On the downside, it only works as an app, so you need to upload your photos via an Android or IOS device. On the upside, you get up to 500 free prints every month, all printed on 6x4in glossy paper for the price of delivery (couple of quid, waived for the first month).
It’s not as easy as the old days, though. Digital photos don’t want to be printed. Your average Instagram snap is too small, square and contrasty to print well. I’m not on Instagram (I’m not 15), but I do have pics all over the place - Facebook, Google Photos, hard drive, Android, down the back of the sofa - so it took hours to round them up into a folder for Freeprints. And very few were the required proportions and resolution.
I used Irfanview’s ‘Create maximized selection’ tool to crop some images to 3:2 so they’d fill out 6x4in, then selected JPG Lossless Crop to limit the damage of saving a new version. But I left most photos un-cropped and didn’t resample any. Resampling adds pixels to make a file bigger, but I don’t think it improves their print quality. The best way to ensure a digital photo is big enough to print well is to use the original high-res file, without cropping. Just like negatives.
My files are now in the hands of the Freeprints lab. I know the worst of my digitally assaulted JPGS will look awful on paper, but I bet you half my house they’ll look better than anything my inkjet would have produced. Just don’t let me use them as bookmarks. If you ever buy Catch-22 from a British Heart Foundation shop and out falls that photo of me and my sister on the Isle of Wight in 1976, I’d be ever so grateful for its return.
To squeeze a decent print from a photo you have to fix its resolution, so it doesn’t look like pixelated porridge