The Digital Photography Companion

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APPROACH 1: DIRECT PRINTING

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Prints are also beautiful. You can hold a print, feel the texture of its surface, mount it on

the wall, or just let it sit quietly on a table, beckoning those passing by to lift it into their

hands. is is artwork that we can make.

And the good news is that all of this beauty doesn’t have to come out of pain, because

printing can be simple too. Yes, later on, you may want to refine your workflow to get

that extra 10% of precision. But for now, the real goal is to get you printing and produc-

ing great-looking stuff. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do in this chapter.

Fresh Approach to Printing

Printmaking falls into two basic categories: prints you make yourself and those that are

commercially produced by a service. Regardless of the final destination, you need to fol-

low a few basic steps to ensure success.

e journey begins with figuring out your best images. One of the blessings of digital

photography is that we don’t need to print every picture we take. We shoot lots and lots

with a camera, find the best shots on the memory card, perfect them on the computer,

and then choose just a handful for output to paper.

After photographing a birthday party, for example, you don’t need two hundred

4×6-inch snapshots lying around the house. at’s what web pages are for. Figure out

which half dozen images truly capture the essence ...