Print Like a Pro: A Digital Photographer’s Guide

Introduction

My first attempts at printing images, almost 20 years ago now, were pitiful by today’s standards. Of course, this was before digital cameras were available and a “high–quality” scanner was able to do 300 dpi in black and white. Color scanners? Dream on! My first color printer was an Apple ImageWriter II, a dot-matrix printer that was able to slowly print very basic color at noise levels that rivaled a jumbo jet. From there I moved up to a new technology: inkjet. The early HP DeskJet printers were light years ahead of that ImageWriter II in quality.

Still, the idea of printing a color image that resembled a photograph was just a fantasy. At the time, it was easy to be impressed by the simple fact that your page contained anything ...