We ended last week with tips for making great-looking prints from your digital photos. Here’s some more…

Ever had someone tell you “that would be a great picture, if it wasn’t for me being in it”? Now you can grant them their wish. In the old days (like, five years ago, which is almost “Middle Earth” in technology time) you got your printed photos back from the developer, and if you wanted to “crop” or remove something from the frame, you had to get a pen and a ruler, mark the doomed area, and give it back to the developer (with some more cash). Digital photography puts the onus on you. In other words, you can now cut unwanted matter out of your photos with a few mouse strokes. Remember one thing – if you crop a low-resolution image considerably, you remove a lot of the pixels in the image. If you try to then “zoom in” or enlarge the remaining area, you will come up against the dreaded “trying to make a little picture bigger” rule I have been talking about and you’ll probably get a fuzzy print. Cropping is good. Do it. In the long run, it’ll save you ink and paper, and it also makes your photos look better. However, when you’re out there taking pictures, don’t use it as a crutch. Try to frame your shot like you can’t crop it later, and you’ll have more flexibility when it comes to editing.

Digital images often appear darker when printed than how they look on your computer screen, especially when printed on photo-quality paper with high-resolution printers. Depending on your subject matter, you might consider using your software to lighten the image a bit before printing.

Digital images can also be a bit blurry, although sometimes this is corrected within the camera itself. In any case, consider sharpening the photo before printing. Don’t sharpen too much, however, as your photo will become pixilated and grainy.

Another way of sharpening an image is to adjust the contrast. As you increase the contrast, you make the image darker, so you may have to lighten the image as you go along.

Without getting too technical, due to a variety of shooting conditions, the color balance (the relationship between the red, green, and blue colors) in digital photos can be little “off”. Good editing software can adjust this balance to get the color just right.

In some programs, like Apple’s iPhoto, there’s an “Image Enhancer” one-button tool that can handle some of the things we’re talking about for you. Don’t be afraid to experiment to get the best results. Until you save any changes, you can “Undo” most anything.

So, what about archiving those shoeboxes full of prints you have from your “pre-digital” days? Now we’re talking about a scanner. You have basically three choices: print, negative, and flatbed. Print scanners are specifically designed to scan your snapshot-sized photo prints, but some can handle slides or negatives as well. Negative scanners scan from slides or negatives, and are what most pros use. They have great resolution capabilities, but if you can’t find the negative to a photo you’re out of luck. The best option for most consumers is the flatbed scanner. They’re quite flexible – besides photos they can scan documents (and even convert them into editable digital form with the help of Optical Character Recognition software), and some come equipped with transparency adapters to scan slides and negatives.

Selecting a scanner to fit your needs can be a daunting task, as there are many factors to consider. We’ll tackle all that next week.

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski