How To Print Digital Photos At Home For Less

Digital photo printing is one of the most popular printing tasks that people carry out but it’s also one of the most expensive. Printing a digital photo uses a lot of ink - far more than a standard text document - meaning that an intensive photo enthusiast can get through ink cartridges incredibly quickly.

However, there are a number of ways you can reduce the cost of printing digital photos at home and luckily, they’re relatively easy to implement too!

Photo Editing

Photo editing is something that a lot of people printing photos either forget to do or try to avoid completely. It’s easy to see why; photo-editing can be an extremely technical task bewildering to the average person just wanting to print out a few holiday snaps.

However, you don’t necessarily have to fully immerse yourself into the highly-technical world of photo editing to get some decent cost-saving results. Cropping your photos, for example, gives you more ‘photo’ for your print and means less ink is wasted on objects that you don’t necessarily want in the printed photo. Cropping is a simple task that you can carry out in most photo editing applications.

Resolution is perhaps the most important thing to consider when printing out a digital photo. Measured in dots-per-inch, resolution essentially dictates the quality of the final image; a higher resolution photo will be of a better quality than a low-res photo, which can appear blocky in its final print.

That doesn’t mean you should always print in the highest resolution though. Most people find that a middle ground between high and low-res suits them just fine. The standard resolution of a digital photo varies between digital cameras so it’s important to check before you hit print and make sure you’re printing at the lowest resolution acceptable to your own personal needs.

You should also make sure that everything in the photo is to your liking before you start printing; if you want to ‘smooth over’ any blemishes or remove instances so that your family doesn’t like a brood of demons, do it before you print to avoid having to print again later!

Edit Your Printing Settings

Anyone who reads the Cartridge World blog regularly will know that misprints are a big drain on your printing costs and this is none truer than with digital photos. The amount of ink the average digital photo makes misprints extra costly, so it’s wise to try and avoid them altogether.

The main culprit for misprints is people not checking their document settings before they print. Digital photo files, pre-editing, can be setup to print across multiple pages owing to their size. There are two ways to change this – you can either set the photo to fit to a certain page size or edit the size of the photo itself. The former is probably the easier of the two methods but can compromise image quality, particularly if you’re trying to fit a small image to a larger size of paper.

Resizing the image itself can be done through most photo-editing software and can be done one of two ways. Scaling is the easier method and basically retains the same amount of pixels in an image while make it bigger – this can be effective for small size changes or scaling down but can lead to ugly images if used for making an image larger.

More effective, but more technically advanced, is image resampling, which actually changes the number of pixels in an image, leading to a higher quality image. The process of resampling isn’t too tricky but we’d recommend taking a look through this tutorial before having a go yourself.

Photo Supplies

Finally, consider the supplies you use when printing photos. While photo paper might seem like an expensive luxury, the quality of images printed out on it and the papers ability to hold ink makes it a superior choice to standard printer paper and means less effort in attaining that ‘perfect print’. Essentially, you’re using less paper to get a better quality print – saving you money in the long term.

And, of course, there’s the cost of replacing the printing supplies you’ve used up in your photo printing ventures. You probably already know what we’re going to suggest here but photo fanatics – and, in fact, anyone who finds themselves printing photos on a semi-regular basis – should really consider buying remanufactured ink cartridges or refilling their old cartridges. With a quality guarantee and significantly lower costs, there really is nothing to lose!

So, photo printing; it doesn’t have to be as expensive as you think. By taking just a few simple steps, you can have a set of high quality photos and enough cash left over to buy a nice album to put them all in!