Question about saving my digital pictures for printing

[sparty314]

I have been using my 10D along with Photoshop Elements for taking and touching up family/pet/vacation pictures. My local Sam's Club has a Fujifilm Digital Minilab Frontier (370, I think). So far, I have been very pleased when I have just taken the CF card right out of my camera, taken it to Sam's Club, inserted it into the Aladdin Countertop Picture Center and selected something like "print images."

My question is about when I want to crop the images or make enlargements like 5 by 7s or 8 by 10s. I cropped an image to a 5 by 7 ratio and did some minor touch up to it and saved as JPEG. However, when I loaded the picture at Sam's, the file did not show up. Is there maybe a maximum size that the Picture Center will open?

The bottom line is I want to know how to print the best quality enlagements from my set-up--10D, Elements, Sam's Club. If I enlarge an image using the Aladdin software at Sam's, does it resample like I would do at home with Photoshop?

[clos]

Sparty,

I have been struggling with the same issues as you with Walmart's Frontier/Alladdin sytem and have made some progress.

Try saving your JPEG's as Baseline as opposed to Progressive. This dialog box giving you this option will appear when you save your JPEG file in photoshop. That should do the trick as far as the Frontier machine being able to read your file. I have read in this forum and others that the file size limit is 2MB but I have not run into this restraint and have printed my full 5+MB file on the Frontier at Walmart.

As for print quality goes I have been resizing the final JPEG to the desired size at 300DPI using BreezeBrowser. I also add some additional sharpening using BB as well. So far this has proved the best quality so far, but I am still experimenting. It may be better to do this within Photoshop to avoid closing and reopening the JPEG but Photoshop does not have a Lanczos filter which to my understanding is better than what PS has.

Also try using ICC profiles found at http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Frontier/using_frontier_profiles.htm for color matching. I tried it and it works great! They also have tips on how to get the best quality print.

Maybe some of the more experienced out there can point us in the right direction. I have found that on the Frontier System...

1. It is better to resize than give the full file
2. It is better to add additional sharpening when resizing

I may be flawed in reaching these conclusions but after alot of trips to Walmart this is what I have come up with.

I hope this helps.

-Clos

[msvirick]

Could you help us out regarding the saving pcture as.. perimeters.
Is it worthwhile to save as a high quality picture after manipulation of the image?