adventures in photo printing

Wow! That's complicated. Maybe it has something to do with my digital camera, but when I upload my photos to Ofoto and my girlfriend orders them from there at fairly conventional sizes, they look pretty good and the cost is pretty low.

How about CVS? I heard they have good kiosks, also.

--Mr. Lex Tue May 10 12:39:10 2005

I usually just use 8.5x11 photo paper in my inkjet and cut.

--Max Tue May 10 12:59:35 2005

Well, they're probably cropping, but if you don't have anything near the edges you might not notice. I didn't want my mountain picture center-cropped though because it was off-center to begin with.

Arguably I'm too concerned about cropping, since the photo frames I got all cut off a bit more of the edge as well.

Ofotos not bad, and I've heard good things about Snapfish.

--Kirk Tue May 10 13:01:05 2005

Max,
that was my plan B...my Uncle Bill didn't have the paper though.

2 questions...are photo printers smart enough to not waste ink printing "white" for a border?

Also, I guess you have to be very sure that your printer doesn't rescale, and/or your software is aware of the "printable area" of the printer. I got good results using Word, for instance.

--Kirk Tue May 10 13:03:14 2005

As long as the color is true white (#FFFFFF), my HP DeskJet interprets that as "do not print anything." In a sense, it has to be that way, as there's no white ink.

--Max Tue May 10 13:32:14 2005

Well, I assume it has some way of printing #FEFEFE light grey, or whatever...they don't make lighter colors just by letting the photostock show through "more", do they?

--Kirk Tue May 10 13:36:48 2005

I did something similar for scanning in photos for my (then infant) son's website photo album. I set up a bunch of profiles with different DPIs and defined sizes, both horizontal & vertical. For each photo is was a simple matter of putting it on the scanner, doing a preview, selecting a profile which fit the desired portion of the image, and dragging the selection box around the preview. It was funny how many horizontal photos were better cropped vertically & vice versa.

--ericball Tue May 10 13:45:13 2005

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