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RSS feedsPrinting is a simple matter of hitting the Print button and sitting back to let your PC and printer do the rest, in theory. Sadly, in reality things are never quite that simple.
Today's inkjet printers are fantastically flexible and can produce great quality text and photo prints, but while your printer might produce pristine text output, the settings will need tweaking to the nth degree to work the same wonders on photographic prints.
Armed with the right information, however, you can wave goodbye to your printing woes. We'll talk you through the whole process and soon you'll be producing best-quality prints every time.
Quality control
Before you even think about going anywhere near your printer, you first need to consider the most important aspects of printing: the quality of the image you're printing and the size at which you should print it. In other words, you need to understand the dimensions of your picture.
Modern printers are capable of producing prints at far higher resolutions than your monitor can display, so a picture that looks big on screen could be smaller when printed.
As a general rule of thumb, a Jpeg photograph with a file size of at least 300KB is likely to be a suitable size for printing, though there are no hard and fast rules.
Size isn't everything, though, and the quality of the image is equally as important. If you have a grainy, badly coloured image then you can't expect the prints to be any better.
When selecting images for printing make sure that you pick the highest quality ones you have. You might want to use a photo-editing package to crop the image to the part you want to print, and perform corrections like red-eye removal or brightness and contrast balance.
Obviously, you should content yourself with the image's on-screen appearance before attempting to print, as this will save on ink, paper and time, but we'll come back to this point.
A perfect match
Printing an image so that its appearance on paper is identical to that on screen comes down to something called 'colour calibration'. In simple terms, it's necessary because monitors produce colours in a different way to printers. The former use light to make colours; the latter ink.
This means that colours displayed on a monitor have to be translated into an appropriate format before they can be printed.
It's the job of the printer driver to carry out this translation and how successfully it does this depends on its colour calibration. The process is further complicated by the type of image being printed and the best printer drivers judge each image on its individual merits so that, for example, photographs are treated differently to coloured documents.
Some printer drivers allow a degree of fine-tuning for the colour calibration process, others make it entirely automatic. Either method is usually sufficient for most people, as minor differences between displayed and printed colours are acceptable.
To delve any further into colour calibration, you need to be a serious digital photography enthusiast with deep pockets, as calibration kits cost around £350.
If you're willing to pay this price to ensure you're getting the best colour rendition possible, Colour Confidence provides various packages for the colour-conscious printer user.
Adding some colour
Depending on your printer, you might find that you have a choice of ink cartridges: three, five or even seven colours.
Three-colour cartridges are the most common and use cyan, magenta and yellow. When combined with the black cartridge, they produce a range of colours sufficient to meet the everyday printing needs of most people.
Five-colour cartridges include two additional hues of cyan and magenta, which enable the printer to produce a more complex array of colours, which in turn improves the look of skin tones and so forth.
In short, if you have the option to use a five-colour cartridge, you will find that the quality is a lot better than with the default three-colour option. HP has just raised the stakes with the introduction of an eight-colour printer, the Photosmart 7690.
To see the options that your printer supports read the product documentation or visit the relevant manufacturer's website.
Paper types
Slotting standard A4 copier paper into your printer and hoping for brilliant results will get you nowhere.
The majority of inkjet printers use dye-based ink for colour, which is absorbed easily by cheap paper, leading to colours bleeding into one another. This also dampens the paper, causing it to wrinkle, which is hardly going to give you beautiful prints.
As an aside, this problem isn't so bad when printing with black ink, as most black inks are now pigment based. Without going into the full technical detail, pigment-based inks aren't absorbed by paper in the same way, avoiding many of the problems associated with standard ink.
However, creating pigment-based colour inks is expensive, which is why most consumer printers rely on dye-based inks.
One remedy for this problem is to use specially treated paper, sometimes referred to simply as 'inkjet paper'. In your printer's manual you will find a list of recommended paper, usually the manufacturer's own-brand paper. For the best results, we suggest using the recommended stock.
There are two types of paper you need to know about: inkjet paper and photo paper. Inkjet paper is of a high enough grade to absorb ink without becoming too wet or allowing colours to bleed. However, it's only designed for printing text and the occasional picture.
For the best results you need to buy some glossy photo paper. Physically, this resembles a blank photograph and has the sheen you'd expect to find after having your photos developed at a film processing outlet. It makes a huge difference when printing and results are very impressive.
There are lots of different types of photo paper that range in quality. We suggest using the paper recommended by the printer manufacturer, going by the general rule that the more expensive the paper, the better the quality.
Preview your prints
Once you've covered all the bases mentioned and prepared everything, you're ready to start printing.
One of the most important tools for this process is the Print Preview function, which is available in most Windows applications under the File menu. It is useful because it shows you exactly what the print is going to look like on paper, ensuring that you do not waste costly paper unecessarily.
This way you can check that the image fits on the page properly and that there aren't any major problems. It's a simple but effective way of saving on ink and paper. If you find that the image won't fit properly then you need to alter the page set-up.
Depending on the application you're using this will be done in different ways, so you should refer to the documentation. In all programs, the essence of what you can do will be the same but our screenshots show Paint Shop Pro 7.
First, check the paper size. Have you got the correct size selected? If not, this can cause the preview to look wrong. Next, is the orientation (portrait or landscape) as it should be? Choosing the orientation to match your image is an easy way to fit the print on the page correctly.
If you find the image is too big to fit on the page, look for a scaling option (probably called Fit to Page, or similar). This will resize the image to fit the page before printing and give you the best results. If, on the other hand, the image is too small, there's not a lot you can do.
If you try to enlarge the image you'll just end up with visible squares of colour in your printed picture; this is called pixelation.
Driver settings
Once you're happy with the print preview, it's time to change some settings in the printer driver to optimise the quality of the output. In your image-editing application select Print from the File menu and click on the Properties button.
Depending on your printer, you might find that what you see on the screen differs from our screenshots. Don't worry, you can still follow our tips but you might need to refer to your documentation to locate a particular setting or option.
Here, we've begun with the Layout option. This lets you pick the orientation of the print, which is useful if you can't find the same option in your image-editing application. Next, there will be a tab for paper and quality settings.
In the paper section, you must select the type of paper you are using, such as photo-quality inkjet paper, as this helps the printer achieve the best results. It goes without saying that the quality setting should be selected as the the highest on offer, often simply called Best.
You'll also need to adjust the colour setting to meet your needs. You might, for example, find a specific option for printing black and white photos.
Once you have made all the required changes, click the OK button to apply the settings and then the OK button again to print. You should now have the best quality prints that your printer can manage.
Troubleshooting
If you've followed our advice and find that your printouts have some flaws, such as marks on the page, then there are a few things you can try to rectify the problem.
First, try to clean the heads of your printer using the provided utility. For most printers, the following instructions will work but, if not, check your documentation for the exact process.
In Windows XP, select Printers and Faxes from the Start menu. Next, right-click on the icon depicting the affected printer and select Properties from the pop-up menu. Click the Utilities tab, select Head Cleaning and follow the on-screen prompts.
Ensure that there is at least one sheet of blank paper in the feeder before initiating the physical cleaning process. Your printer will remove built-up grime that could be interfering with your prints.
Following the steps outlined you should also discover an alignment option for the print heads: if you find that distinct lines in images fail to print accurately, or that printed text looks messy, it's worth initiating this process.
Finally, remember that the documentation that came with the printer will have a complete guide to troubleshooting, so keep it to hand.
Print with pride
Now that you know where to look and what to do to your hardware, getting the most out of your prints shouldn't prove too difficult. Hopefully, our pointers will soon have you proudly displaying your holiday pictures on the wall in all their glory. Happy printing.
Printer drivers
The printer driver is one of the most important aspects of a printer. It gives access to all of the printer's settings and lets you choose the best quality printing modes.
Make sure, where possible, that you are using the printer driver supplied by the manufacturer, rather than a generic one. Windows has a lot of these built in, but they don't always give access to the full range of features and options. Besides, the printer's documentation won't tally unless you are using the correct driver.
At times, it may be necessary to update the driver, just as you would a graphics card or application. If you are experiencing problems, we recommend visiting the manufacturer's website and downloading the latest driver for your PC.
Perfect prints part 2: Size matters
See also:
All Peripheral Devices
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