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The highlight of a Digital Photography 101 class is sharing your photography with others. With digital photography there are many ways you can do this: email, your website, online photography albums, but as for those really good photos, they deserve to be printed and framed in beautiful unique picture frames.

Besides hanging your best photographs in wall picture frames, there are a few other reasons you may find you have for printing your photos. Here are some of the ways you can use printed pictures:

• Displayed in wood picture frames on the mantle, table and wall displays
• Posters
• Wallet pictures
• Memory books
• Greeting cards
• Photo crafts
• Photo competitions

Even in our digital day and age, we still have lots of interesting and beautiful things to do in print! But printing a photograph isn't as easy as selecting “Print” on your computer. Printing a quality print of a photograph is trickier than printing, say, a flyer. These photo printing tips will help make the process easier so you can get better quality prints.

Digital Photography 101 – Pixels Matter

Whenever you resize a photo on your computer, think first if you may ever want to print it. If so, be sure to hang on to the original. 

The first thing to understand is how many pixels are needed when taking a picture in order to get a high enough resolution to produce a quality print for the physical size you want. Below are some examples to help you know how many pixels are needed for different sizes of prints.

High Quality Picture: 10×13 inches
2592 x1944 pixels (a 5 mega pixel camera set for high resolution)

High Quality: 9 x 12 inches
2272 x 1704 pixels ( a 4 mega pixel camera set for high resolution)

High Quality Picutres: 8 x10 inches
2048 x 1536 pixels ( a 3 mega pixel camera set for high resolution)

High Quality: 4 x 6 inches, 5 x 7 inches
1600 x 1200 pixels (2 megapixel camera set for high resolution)

As you can see, you don't need a camera with tons of megapixels to get quality prints.

Using the proper settings on your printer is also important to getting a quality picture. Check with your manual or the manufacturers recommendations on their website. You can then use a photo editor to resample the pictures to the right dpi. For those new to printing, dpi stands for “dots per inch”. The more dots per inch, the finer the grain of the picture and the better it looks. The ink jet printers on the market today that are used for quality photo prints often have dpi resolution of around 1200 to 4800. This range of dpi will make quality prints that have around 140 to 300 pixels per inch.

Please note that the ppi or pixels per inch is the measurement for the resolution of a photograph taken with a digital camera, not to be confused with the height and width of the photo. For example a 200 pixel x 300 pixel picture would be very small while a picture with a 300 ppi isn't necessarily small because ppi refers to the quality of the picture (not the physical size).

Digital Photography 101 –  Paper for Picture Perfect Prints

Use photo-printing paper and if possible that which is made by your printer's manufacture and is recommended for your model or model family. For projects like greetings cards, use special card stock paper. You can find them online or at craft stores or office supply stores.

If you need high quality prints or extra large pictures, you can also go to your local photography store or order them online from a reputable retailer.

Have fun printing your digital images!