3AW.com.au technology blogger, Risto Sampola, gives you regular technology tips and reviews. Read his latest below and feel free to place a question - he will answer it.

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Digital cameras have now almost entirely replaced their film-based counterparts and the popularity of digital cameras is such that most households nowadays seem to have one – or more. Once the initial investment has been made the act of snapping pictures and transferring them to your computer doesn’t really cost a bean. We snap pictures like there’s no tomorrow and our hard drives are bulging with photos galore. However, when it comes to showing off our photos, it’s all too often a case of ‘everybody gather around the computer’. It’s only if you ask someone to show you pictures from ten or more years ago that the photo album comes out. Printing digital pictures with good results isn’t that difficult and as a matter of fact it’s a very satisfying to complete a whole album with pictures you’ve printed, perhaps even edited, yourself.

First of all, if you want to find something, you’ll have to be organised. When I bought my first digital camera about ten years ago, I had one folder on my computer called ‘Photos’ and that’s where all the pictures went. Soon I realised I had to get organised, so while I still have that ‘Photos’ folder, now it’s full of sub-folders with relevant names and dates to make it a breeze to find a photo I might have taken at a particular event six years ago. I’ve also realised how many people keep the ‘dud shots’ too. If a photo is truly bad then just delete it as otherwise it’s just hogging up space on your hard drive and getting in the way of the good stuff. These house keeping rules also apply to pictures someone might have emailed you. Store the emailed pictures in an appropriately named folder as this will save you the hassle of trying to find that email every time you want to access the photos. And then delete or archive that email to keep your inbox manageable!

While it is possible to get your digital photos printed for you, the quality isn’t always the best possible, because the printers must favour volume over quality in order to stay in business. So if you choose to print them yourself then a photo printer is of course a must. Printers are stupid-cheap these days, but there is a catch - ink. Each manufacturer has their own ink cartridges and most models from a given manufacturer will also use different ink cartridges, so you’re stuck with buying the manufacturer’s inks and they can be pretty costly. There are third party companies who make compatible ink cartridges, but again there’s not a lot of quality assurance. For example, how much will the photo fade in ten years and how accurate are the colours. If you’re on the market for a new printer make sure you factor in the on going costs.

Some cheaper printers also use multi-colour cartridges, so if one colour has run out you’ll have to replace the entire cartridge even though the other colours may still have some ink left. As a matter of fact, some printers are so cheap that they must be sold at a loss to the manufacturer, because they know (or at least hope) you’ll more than make up the difference by shelling out for their inks for years to come. More ‘upmarket’ printers often have a separate ink cartridge for each colour and this allows you to replace each colour only when it has well and truly run out.  Also, bear in mind that the bundled ink cartridges your printer actually comes with are usually much smaller in volume than the replacement inks. This means that the often heard argument of, “It was cheaper to buy a new printer than new inks...” doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny.

There are two main ink types – dye and pigmentation. Most cheaper printers will use dye inks as they are lower in cost, but also offer higher brilliance and range of colours that can be reproduced. Pigmentation inks, on the other hand, offer a longer life and very little fading, even after a few decades. Another pigmentation ink advantage is their reduced bleeding of inks due to super-fast drying times, so images can be sharper and less smudged.

OK, so you’ve got a printer and ink and now all you need is some paper. Welcome to another myriad of products with most printer manufacturers selling their own brand paper and in a large variety. Then you have to add all the third party companies who make printer paper, but not printers. There’s glossy, matt, archival, semi-gloss, ultra-gloss, everyday paper... As a general guide, when it comes to photos, obviously stick to ‘photo paper’ and the choice of level of gloss is an individual preference, but personally I prefer semi-gloss. A lot of printer manufacturers pack a few different paper samples with their printers, which is of course a marketing exercise of sorts, but it will allow you to test them out before buying your own supplies. And when you do buy some, get it in bulk as it works out so much cheaper and as long as stored properly (away from heat and humidity) will keep for years. How the paper is cut will also usually have an impact on its pricing. I personally always print on A4 paper as this allows me to print four (roughly 6” x 4”) photos on a single sheet and I then use a scalpel and a steel ruler to cut the single A4 sheet. This works out quite a bit cheaper than buying ready cut 6x4’s and with two slices of the scalpel takes next to no time at all to cut to size. Most printers will ship with software that lets you choose how many photos per sheet you print to make this easy. As a last note on paper, please make sure you’ve selected the paper type you’re using from the printer’s utility menu. Selecting the wrong paper type can mean paper soaked in ink or not enough ink on absorbent paper.

While our film cameras didn’t give us much of a chance to tweak our photos, with digital images the world is your oyster. Even simple edits, like altering colour, contrast and brightness can have a huge impact on how the printed result will look. Removing red-eye is now relatively simple with basic photo editing software and the mere act of cropping a photo can have a huge effect on how the finished result displays. A beauty of a photo taken on a cloudy day might benefit from a little extra brightness, a slightly over exposed picture could benefit from a little extra contrast and so on. Sometimes a photo can look better in black&white, so try turning the picture monochrome, to see what effect that has – particularly handy for portraits and moody scenery shots. If you have a scanner you can also revisit some of those photos you took with a film camera some time ago, but may now have faded. Simply scan the photo and you can then edit it with more vibrant colours and then reprint it. While PC’s and Macs come with their own basic photo editing software nothing beats Photo Shop, which is an ‘industry standard’ photo editor. The full-blown version of Photo Shop is pretty expensive, but there is also a version called Photo Shop Elements, which comes in at around $150,- and includes the most often used tools of the full version and is also arguably more user friendly to novices. However, the ‘under the hood’ processing is pretty much the same, so the quality of results is superb. You can even download a free trial from its developers – www.adobe.com.au – highly recommended!

If you thought I’d get through this article without mentioning pixels... well, no such luck! A ‘pixel’ is a ‘picture element’ or in layman’s terms, a dot. Because digital involves numbers a digital photo is essentially a grid of dots with each dot being given a colour as this can be represented as a number – albeit as very large one. You may have heard the term DPI (dots per inch) and this refers to the resolution of the picture. The human eye cannot resolve lines thinner than 1/300th of an inch, so if a picture is printed at 300 DPI it is impossible for the naked eye to see any individual pixels. Your photo editing software will tell you the pixel dimensions of a photo and this way you can tell just how large you can print it without seeing the effects of ‘pixellation’. A bog-standard 5 Mega Pixel camera will output its photos at around 1944 x 2592 pixels, so if you divide each dimension by 300 you can quickly figure out how large you can print the picture without any signs of pixellation. In this case we would arrive at around 6.5” x 8.6”, which is smaller than A4, so if you were to print this picture out as A4 you would be able to detect a small amount of pixellation, but could possibly get away with it as we’re not pushing the envelope too far. However, printing it out at A3 would almost certainly result in a fairly jagged image when viewed close up. If a photo gets mounted to a frame with glass then you can sometimes get away with a little more pixellation as the glass hides it to an extent.

All in all it’s all a simple process and with a little practice you’ll be amazed at what you can achieve. So, go out and buy a new photo album (if you still remember what they look like!), get some quality paper and get cracking. The convenience and flexibility of home printing will always get you better results than the ‘bulk printers’ at your local shopping centre and the satisfaction an album full of pictures you’ve edited and printed yourself is the cherry on top. While I have photos emailed to me often, I cannot recall the day when someone last sent me a few ‘real photos’ in an envelope. Ah, how I miss those days!

Risto's Technology Blogs

Risto Sampola simplifies new technology for 3AW.com.au readers so you can make the informed purchasing decisions and learn how to trouble-shoot issues you may face with your technology.