Printing Photos

maiMelissa

I want to print a photo I took into a very big picture (like size of a poster), but before I print it out I want to see whether or not it will be grainy. How can I check how the printout version will be before I waste $40 printing it out?

MisterD

I'm afraid I end up with three versions of each shot; the original RAW CR2, a tiff of the shot post-processing (to retain the photo in a lossless format for best-quality printing) and a jpg to put on a digital photo frame to use as wallpaper. Needless to say, all of that gobbles up memory so a separate hard-drive is a cheap and worthwhile investment (you can keep it off site in case your place burns down) or you can upload to the cloud (if heavy bandwidth usage isn't an issue; it took four weeks of 24/7 online to upload my back catalogue!). Some printing firms also offer a plastic canvas format which makes certain types of shots really neat!

maiMelissa

Thanks Liontamer and MisterD, that's very helpful. I stopped taking RAW because I don't have the skills yet to edit very well and I realized they gobbled my memory. When I'm more advanced in editing I might decide to take RAW but for now I take 18MP as Liontamer said.

MisterD

It took me a while to get the hang of RAW (and my wife still thinks it's cheating), but I now only use the jpg versions of my shots to quickly eliminate the RAW ones that I don't want to process. I tried to get used to Canon's bundled software but eventually reverted to Photoshop. Yes, there's a terrifying range of functions, but the basics are quickly mastered and from then on it's just how much you want to spend time messing around instead of getting out there and taking some more photos. If you want to run a slideshow from your PC into your 40" TV, you need good quality images.

maiMelissa

MisterD, I also tend to think RAW is cheating; too much editing of photos I see around.

MisterD

@MaiMelissa
Obviously I'll defend myself about editing, but it's not much different from when wet film was under/over-exposed when fixed with chemicals. I think that as long as you took the photo it's yours to do whatever you like with it. It's primarily for your own enjoyment, but if someone else wants to buy it in edited form, that's their choice too.

maiMelissa

Very true @liontamer. @MisterD the editing I see a lot of times you can actually see that this photo has been edited. I think photos should be edited such that the viewer of the photo cannot see that it has been edited.

v_k

How do you make sure your photo is in full 18MP size?