Lab

Online Photo Printing

Digital cameras and computers make great bedfellows. You can use your PC to archive thousands and thousands of photos - and unlike old film-based cameras, you won't end up with cupboards full of dusty rolls of film or boxes of snaps. But while keeping a well organised and huge collection of pictures is easy with a computer, there are still a few things to think about. The most important is how and where do you get them all printed out?

You might think that getting your photos developed was already easy enough. After all, what could be simpler than posting off a clutch of films in an envelope to Snappyprints'R'Us, or wandering down to your local photo developer?

Digital photos offer even greater convenience and flexibility when it comes to getting hard copies of your pictures. You could buy a portable photo printer like those we reviewed in our last issue, or, if quality isn't an absolute concern, you could use your old inkjet to print out a couple of your favourite shots.

While doing it yourself can be satisfying task, it can also be time-consuming and particularly fiddly. Not to mention expensive. By the time you take the price of ink and specialist photo paper into account, 6x4in photos cost around 28p per print. If you're going to be doing a lot of printing, then those costs soon mount up.

This is where online printing services can save you serious cash - the more you print, the cheaper they become. In this test, we'll be looking at a number of services, which enable you to print your photos from as little as 10p a print. And in many cases, the quality of these is actually higher than those produced by home printing. On top of that, you'll find options to create online photo galleries so that friends can peruse your efforts, as well as fun uses for your pictures such as T-shirts, mugs, mousemats, posters and the like.

Preparing Photos

Giving your photos a careful once-over before sending them off will improve your chances of being happy with the results that land on your doorstep. Principally, you'll need to ensure all your pictures are of sufficiently high quality and that they've been saved in an appropriate file format.

Some online photo printing services will tell you whether your photos are of a high enough quality to be printed on paper sizes larger than the standard 6x4in. You should, however, try to make sure that all your files are as close to 300dpi (dots per inch) as possible at their finished size - so a 6x4in photo should measure 1,800x1,200 pixels.

Checking the resolution of an image is easily done in photo editing software. For example, in Paint Shop Pro 9 you should go to the Resize option on the Image menu. This tells you how many pixels high and wide your image is, and also gives its resolution in dots per inch. Make sure you don't change the total number of pixels as this will degrade the quality of the image. Unticking the resample option makes sure your photos stay looking their best.

The resolution setting controls how many dots are packed into an inch, so increasing it improves the quality of the image, but decreases the print size. As photos are usually measured in inches, change the print size to inches and enter the size you'd like the photo to be. Depending on the image itself, and whether you've cropped it to pick out particular details, you might find that your picture isn't exactly the right size. It's best to make sure it's a little bigger than the required dimensions rather than any smaller. Once your photo is the correct size, check the resolution. If it's substantially lower than 200dpi your print won't look sharp and you'll be able to make out individual blocks.

Once you've carried out these checks there's no need to resave the image. With JPEG files, the format that's used by most digital cameras, resaving images reduces their quality every time. If your camera produces other file formats, such as uncompressed TIFF or RAW files, you'll need to save them as JPEGs before you can upload them to your chosen online printing service. To do this, open the files in your image editing software and select 'Save as' from the file menu. Select JPEG or .JPG as the required format, and in the options tab - this varies between different image editing programs - ensure that you select the highest quality and lowest compression settings. If you use higher compression the files will be smaller, but your pictures will become more pixellated and ugly-looking. Before you save, it's worth checking that your pictures use the normal 24-bit RGB colour mode rather than the professional CMYK that some programs, including Photoshop, can save in.

E-mailing Photos

Why not e-mail all your favourite holiday snaps to all your friends and family? Well, before you eagerly start sending pictures flying around the Internet you should stop and think for a moment. Photos taken by digital cameras can be quite large files, particularly if they have been taken at a camera's high quality setting. Sending more than a handful of these could be enough to clog up someone's e-mail inbox, or make their mail server bounce your messages back. It's always prudent to check how many megabytes of data they're allowed to receive before sending any pics. If you need to send several to someone whose e-mail has a rather meagre attachment limit, you should use some image editing software to reduce the resolution of photos first. If you have lots of pictures you'd like to share then read our guide to setting up your own online photo gallery on page 24.

How Colour Works

It doesn't matter what lengths you go to in order to get your photos printed out exactly as they appear on your PC's monitor, it's just never going to happen. A number of the differences will be down to the way that colour information in your photos is understood by your monitor, but some of the principal ones are down to physics.

As your computer's monitor sends out light, it's described as being 'emissive'. The light emitted by your display is picked up by your eyes and transmitted to your brain, which interprets these different wavelengths of light as colour. Each dot or 'pixel' in a PC's monitor possesses a red, green and blue element, and the relative brightness of each one dictates what colour your eyes see on screen. Full red plus full green and no blue creates yellow, while all three colours at full intensity you get white. This type of colour blending is technically known as 'additive mixing'.

Photo paper, mugs, T-shirts and other everyday objects are 'reflective' materials. This means that they don't make, or 'emit', any light. However, a portion of the wavelengths making up the white light that strikes these objects is bounced off, to be picked up by your eyes. By way of example, a red mug is red as its surface because it reflects red light, and absorbs all the other colours of the spectrum.

Printing in colour is achieved by combining a different set of primary colours, technically known as 'subtractive' ones: cyan, magenta and yellow. Cyan ink absorbs red light, magenta absorbs green, and yellow absorbs blue. By mixing these colours in different amounts, you create a wide range of colours. Black is added to give depth to darker hues. Because subtractive mixing works by taking away light, it cannot create quite as wide a range of colour as additive mixing. Some colours appear less saturated than others, with bright greens and oranges suffering in particular.

Creating An Online Photo Gallery

While occasionally e-mailing the odd picture isn't too much trouble, if you want to pass photos onto several people, you should try making your own online photo gallery.

If you're a really keen photographer, or just have hundreds of images that your friends and relatives are clamouring to see, it's free, easy and fun too!

Head on over to www.flickr.com, and if you already have a Yahoo! ID, just sign in and get on with setting up your account. If you're new to both Yahoo! and Flickr, then click the Sign Up Now option to start your free account. It may take a few minutes.

Having signed up and logged in, all that you need to do to get started is click the Upload some photos link. Then click the 'browse' button so you can navigate to where all your photographs are stored on your hard disk. It's worth using an image editor to shrink really big pictures down, or save them in compressed JPEG format if they aren't already. This means you'll get many more photos uploaded before you hit the 20MB monthly upload limit.

If you find doing each picture one by one a little time-consuming, click the Uploading Tools link on the left of the Upload screen. Here you can download the Flickr Uploader, a simple program that allows you to quickly select multiple picture files or drag-and-drop photographs. You can also quickly edit the information and title attached to each picture more easily.

Once your images have been uploaded, you'll be faced with your very own gallery. Here you can select whether you want to make your pictures public or private. If you only want friends or family looking at them you can give them exclusive access to your images by using the Invite option found at the top of the screen.

Printing Online

Getting your digital photos printed is easy. Although you could burn all of the picture files to a CD and wander in to Boots, Jessops or Snappy Snaps and get your holiday photos printed out in a matter of hours, if you have a decent Internet connection - preferably broadband - you don't even need to get up out of your comfy computer chair to do so!

If you're running Windows XP, you can gain direct access to online photo printing services simply by heading over to your My Pictures folder - My Pictures is a folder inside of your My Documents folder. Click the Order Prints Online tab on the left of the window and the Online Print Ordering Wizard pops up. You can use one of three different companies: Bonusprint, Jessops or Print@ExtraFilm.com.

We wouldn't recommend using Windows' built-in wizard, though. Going directly to a Web-based processing service may take slightly longer, but it'll be easier to keep track of the whole process - particularly if you want to print lots of photos. Also, by going directly to a Web site, you won't miss out on any of the small print, or neat additional features, like photo cropping, that a particular printing service might put at your disposal.

We tried five online photo processing services, and prices ranged from 10p to 89p for a single print. Quality was generally good, and the best provided photographs that were vibrant, sharp and felt like traditional prints. Sending images to these online services will take some time on a 56K dial-up modem, but even without broadband it's still easy to do! Most Web-based processing firms let you keep your pictures on their server once they've been uploaded, so getting more prints or enlargements of your favourites is generally a quick and painless process.

But why use an online photo processing service when you could just use an inkjet printer or a portable photo printer like we reviewed last month? The principal reason is expense. Even a dedicated photo printer that's cheap to run ends up costing at least 25p per 6x4in print - and that's not taking into account that you might print out the wrong photo, or put the paper in the wrong way round. Plus there's the time and effort you spend cropping and laying out your snaps on the page, as well as guillotining them into individual pictures when they're done.

Some of the services here let you pre-pay for hundreds of prints at a time to save money. And with pre-paying for your pictures making the cost of individual photographs as low as 10p each, less than half the price of home prints, it's a tempting proposition.

Buying Decisions

All the services here proved that getting your digital photos sent off, developed and sent to your door is wonderfully straightforward. And with even the tardiest service taking a very reasonable three days, the most impatient photographers are unlikely to be tapping their fingers for too long. But two services we tested in particular raised themselves above the competition.

If money is no object, then keen photographers will love the quality of prints available from Snappy Snaps. This service isn't the cheapest available, and you have to pick up the photos from your local store, but it did produce the best quality prints in our test by a noticeable margin.

Overall, though, it's Photobox that earns our coveted Best Buy award, with its combination of superb service at a low price. Our photos were reproduced beautifully, delivered the next morning, and Photobox's Web site is easily the best designed of all those on test. Sharing photos with friends, family and getting your pictures printed has never been so easy.