Grainy pictures

shawna

Hello Moose,
My pictures look great on my camera and on my computer, but when I go to print them they look grainy! I am a beginner and dont really know what could be causing this.

Thanks, Shawna

bruto

It's hard to know exactly what the problem is without knowing what the printer settings might be. If the pictures look really good on the monitor and are not visibly grainy when magnified, I'd suggest you look further into your printer's settings. Many printers have a number of different modes for fast printing of documents, proofs, medium and high quality, and so forth. Make sure yours is set to true photo printing. It makes a big difference too what paper you're using. True photo mode on photo paper should look superb, and should look pretty darn good in small sizes like 4x6 even if the picture is grainy.

If the pictures themselves are grainy, the first thing to do is make sure your ISO is not set high. Second, make sure you're saving them in high quality, and not at some stage converting them to highly compressed JPG form. Finally, make sure you're not underexposing, which will make pictures look grainier. If you want it dark, shoot normally and darken it in post.

shawna

That's great advice, thank you! My friend had the pictures printed some place else so I think it would be my camera settings. I was shooting in jpg and now I am shooting in raw. Perhaps that will help. I'm not sure about under and over exposing, I will have to read up on that one!