Outsourcing Your Printing There are numerous options for ordering prints online. I’ve listed an assortment of services in Table 4.1. Each service is somewhat different in what products they offer, as well as the prices they charge for prints. In the table I’ve listed the price for 4×6 prints as well as the price for the largest photos they make. For more about enlargements, see the next section. TABLE 4.1 PRINTING SERVICES Service Other Types of Partners Price for Largest Print Products Prints 4×6 print* Size (Inches)/ Cost* PEphoto.com Photo books, Luster, glossy, PE ROES engine, 0.06 50×165: contact cards, calendars, metallic, downloadable company for price canvasses, mounted, software for (matte only); mountings, laminated upload 30×40: $29.99 and lamination for first one, $10 for second QOOP.com Canvas prints, Glossy, matte, Flickr 0.19 24×36: $26.99 stickers, greeting canvas prints cards, calendars, business cards, products that other site members make Kodakgallery.com Calendars, cards, Glossy, matte iPhoto 0.15 20×30: $18.99 frames, albums, (matte only) photo books, and gifts PhotoWorks.com Photo cards, gifts Glossy, matte Webshots, 0.15 24×36: $34.95 Flickr, Picasa Shutterfly.com Photo books, Glossy, matte, Picasa 0.15 20×30: $22.99 cards, stationary canvas (order 600 for 0.10 per print) Snapfish.com Calendars, cards, Glossy, matte Picasa 0.09 20×30: $19.99 frames, albums, photo books, and gifts *Costs don’t include shipping. Preparing Your Photos for Use ■ 71 Many printing services require that you become a member of their site. As part of membership, they host your photos. For more about photo hosting, see the “Storing Your Photos Online” section in Chapter 1. Print partners are a very important feature of ordering prints. Online print services team up with photo hosting sites for easy access to photos. For example, you can order the photos you have on Picasa from Snapfish.com. Picasa will forward your photos to Snapfish, Walgreens, Shutterfly, and PhotoWorks. To do this, go to your Picasa album (or photos), select Prints > Order Prints, go onto the next album (or photo), and repeat. When you’re finished picking your photos to print, navigate to Print > View Prints. You’ll be taken to a new window where you can forward the photos you’ve chosen to the print services company you want. Pretty cool. Blowing Up Your Prints to Wall Size If you’re just itching to have one of your photos blown up big—really big—you can have it done by going to the web and ordering it (see Figure 4.7). Online digital imaging sites have software that lets you upload your photos to their servers so they can access them for enlargements. They can then enlarge and print your photo and send it to your snail-mail address. 72 ■ Preparing Your Photos for Use Figure 4.7 You can enlarge your photos using online digital imaging services. NOTE Remember that while it’s nice to have an enlarged photo, you have to think about how you’re going to mount and frame it after you get it enlarged and printed. In Table 4.1, you can see that PEphoto.com blows up prints to sizes up to 50×165. Another site, EnlargePhotos.com, also offers photo enlarging and printing. Here’s the scoop on some sites: ❈ PEphoto.com. You can even talk to these people about your project online at www.help.pephoto.com. A 40×60 print is $79.95 on glossy or matte paper. Shipping costs aren’t included. They can mount photos up to 30×40 inches. ❈ EnlargePhotos.com. A 40×60 print, only available on semi-matte, will run you $108.50. Prints on Satin Canvas are also available; the largest they print on this paper is 32×48 inches. The largest print on photo paper is 34×51. Shipping costs aren’t included. ❈ Epostershop.com. They can blow up your prints to custom sizes. Their recommendations for size are based upon what the resolution of the image is and how far people are from the image when viewing it. Blowing up an image to 36×54 costs $84. Of course, enlarging a photo doesn’t happen with just a snap of the fingers. There are many factors to consider about the photo before you print it. Those are described in the following sidebar. Preparing Your Photos for Use ■ 73 BIG PHOTO MEANS BIG RESOLUTION When you send out your photos for enlargement, it’s best not to fool with them before you do it. If you resize or resample your photo in an image processing program (see the section in Chapter 1 called “Resizing Your Photos for Different Uses”), it’s likely that you’ll degrade its original quality. For example, if you increase the resolution of your photo to 300 dpi and enlarge it to the size you want it printed, Photoshop (or another image processing program) will rebuild the pixels. One thing is for sure, the rebuilt pixels won’t provide the nice detail you had in the original photo. Many enlargement services use photo enlargement programs that are much better than Photoshop, so it’s best to leave the enlargement up to them.There is a good one—Genuine Fractals GF PrintPro—that’s fairly user-friendly if you absolutely have to do the enlargement yourself. The photo that you upload should be one with a high resolution. Before you decide to enlarge a photo, look at it on your monitor at 100-percent magnification. (Type 100 into the bottom left of the window in which your photo is displayed in an image processing program.) If it looks soft or ragged, know that the inconsistencies will show up in the enlargement. With today’s high-megapixel cameras, enlargement has become a lot easier. It’s not uncommon to get a photo enlarged to 42×64 inches if it’s a decent picture taken with a dSLR camera of 8 pixels or more. . They can then enlarge and print your photo and send it to your snail-mail address. 72 ■ Preparing Your Photos for Use Figure 4.7 You can enlarge your photos using online digital imaging services. NOTE Remember. hosting sites for easy access to photos. For example, you can order the photos you have on Picasa from Snapfish.com. Picasa will forward your photos to Snapfish, Walgreens, Shutterfly, and PhotoWorks metallic, downloadable company for price canvasses, mounted, software for (matte only); mountings, laminated upload 30×40: $29.99 and lamination for first one, $10 for second QOOP.com Canvas prints,