Photoshop Elements 4: The Missing Manual

Chapter 14. Printing Your Photos

Now that you've gone to so much trouble making your photos look terrific, you'll probably want to share them with other people. The next three chapters look at the many different options Elements gives you for sharing your photos with the world at large.

This chapter covers the traditional method: printing your photos. You can print your photos at home on an inkjet printer, take them to a printing kiosk at a local store, or use an online printing service. Elements makes it especially easy to use Kodak's EasyShare Gallery, Adobe's online printing partner. And you're not limited to merely ordinary prints these days. You can create hardcover books, calendars, album pages, and greeting cards, too.

Getting Ready to Print

Whether you're going to print at home or send your photos out, you need to make sure your image file is set up to give you good-looking prints.

The first thing to check is your photo's resolution, which controls the number of pixels in your image. If you don't have enough pixels in your photo, you're not going to get a good print. 300 pixels per inch (ppi) is usually considered optimum, and a quality print needs a resolution of at least 150 ppi to avoid the grainy look you see in low-resolution photos (see Section 3.6.2 for more on setting your photo's resolution).

Note

Be sure you set your resolution to a whole number—decimals may cause black lines on your prints with some printers. In other words, 247 ppi is fine, but you may have problems ...