One comment said: what you print at, most inkjets and digital labs will use a 300DPI
file. Anything more is wasted.Hamlin Krewson's Response: This can be debated. Today's printers can do a lot more than 300DPI.
Richard Starr had some good comments.
Here is the problem with printing digital photos: computer screens talk about pixels but printers talk about dots. 150 pixels per inch is roughly 600 dpi in four-color printing. I say roughly, because there are all sorts of dot patterns to print a color. Pull out a magnifying lens and browse the dot patterns in different magazines. (Actually, they talk about lines per inch, and some 600 dpi printers can print 180 lpi and some only print 120 lpi.)
HP says it doesn't matter how many dpi's you have, it is the size of the dot that matters. Thus, swapping the board in Laserwriter II from an NT to a IIf or IIg prints much finer grayscale and finer fonts because the IIf and IIg have variable dot size--from the same print engine and all at 300dpi.
Epson says that its printers have the smallest dots, but HP says that you cannot have dots that small with inkjets because the dots go all over the place and they are the wrong shape. I think they are both right. (Rather than both wrong). Dot shape is a huge issue and as you know, 600 dpi laser is very different from 600 dpi inkjet.
It think it is usually a good idea to send the image to the driver with a pixel count that is an even multiple (at least 1/4) of the stated dpi set forth in the driver. Give the printer some room to construct its 4 color and 7 color dots. But you have to try a couple of different things with each printer. Just like you have to try different paper (often you want whiteness>100--sometimes whiteness of the paper can completely change a photo).
Remember that what your camera says it is and what it is are 2 different things. Many cameras say pixel when they mean dot and some talk about "virtual" pixels" and "effective" pixels. My 2.1 megapixel Epson camera turns out jpegs that differ in size but if I open it in Photoshop they may be only 850 x 550 pixels large. (No my calculator is not broken). If I open the same image in iPhoto the image is usually 1200 x 1600--or sometimes 1984 x 1488. (No my calculator is not broken). I think it may have to do with jpeg translation or how you count the dots. File size ranges from 500k to 800k although they are supposed to be over a meg at highest resolution. This used to bother me a lot, but I am more accepting now. (we are not talking "fatbits" type of control here).
I find that iPhoto works great with my 2.1 megapixel camera. It requires little effort and flowing a 150 (or less) dpi picture to the printer results in surprisingly nice photos. I don't set the dpi in iPhoto--it does it for me and seems to do a good job. I prefer film (a lot) but digital offers the advantage of fast turnaround. Digital also works better on the computer, on screen, and on printers at a lower resolution. And digital works better in iPhoto. iPhoto stores copies of your photos of various resolutions so it is really fast. Before you waste a lot of time poking at your picture, try just picking your favorite picture and printing an 8 x 10 with no alterations except to crop (cropping is important). Then print out a contact sheet. My experience is that if after you figure out the right print driver settings for your paper (there are a couple of million options with Epson) iPhoto takes care of the rest.
iPhoto is also very good at slide shows because it reconstructs the images ahead of time.
Photoshop Elements is wonderful (and a lot cheaper than photoshop), and you can even dump a whole folder of photos to a web page with thumbnails that zoom and everything (you can't do that with iPhoto without a .mac account). But there is a huge learning curve and everything takes time. So if I open Photoshop, the whole point of the digital camera is gone--I am now going to poke at one photo 'till 2 in the morning.
There's also some new free software called Kodak Easyshare, but I haven't used it. Someone else may have.
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