One of the more common questions we get at Print For Fun is how to make sure that your photos are suitable for printing. Many customers are worried that their photos may appear dark or not vibrant after printing and would like to find out how best to edits their photos before sending them for print. The bigger your print out, the more important it is to ensure that the quality is good. For example, if you are printing our larger format prints like our ikea-sized prints, do spend some time to edit to make the photo look good before sending for print.
Here are some of the more common issues that will result in poor photo prints:
- Monitor/ phone too bright – Monitors are generally quite bright, even images on your laptop/ phone that look decent may appear quite dark when printed. One way is to dial down the brightness to get a more accurate sense of your image.
- Print out is usually a shade darker – Most people don’t know that what you see is not usually what you get on a print out. That is the case for all kinds of printing. A simple solution is to brighten your picture about 15-20% brighter than what you see.
- Photo was taken under poor lighting – For images that are taken indoors, where lighting could be cool white, daylight white or warm white, the tint on your image will vary accordingly and would usually be too blue or too yellow, not forgetting the shadows. The solution is to use a software like Adobe Photoshop. If those who don’t have subscription, you can use your phone’s editing software or go to photopea.com. The key is to adjust the tone of the image to correct the white balance. If the shadows are coming too strongly, reduce the shadows to smoothen out the image.
- Use original photos instead of whatsapp photos – Whatsapp photos are compressed. Compressed photos are small in size and don’t have a lot of detail. This means it won’t look as good as an original file when you print A4 size and bigger. As a rule of thumb, the file size should be bigger than 2mb. An iphone photo is usually bigger than that.
If all else fails, let our team at Print For Fun know and we will try our best to assist. You can write in to [email protected] to reach us or call 65471733.