New with Digital Photography

[Ballistic]

Hey all,

New to this forum. Just bought an S30, and taking pictures with it. Imported it on the PC, and tried printing with a couple of programs, including Photoshop and ACDSee. I'm using a Lexmark Z54 printer and Kodak Matte paper. The problem is the prints don't turn out that good. The dots are quite visible and the color isn't perfect. The printer settings are set to high, and set to print on photo paper. BTW my photo paper is not glossy, but matte finished.

Anyways I just need some tips, from experts. I was able to get better results by using the lowest compression (s). Also, I've been printing 4x6, and some 5x7s.

Thanks

[Longwatcher]

Quick first suggestion. check the DPI for the print, even if you select high quality and the DPI in photoshop is less then 180 you will probably see pixel dots on paper.

I personally usually print in 300 or 360 DPI to get the best quality (I use 300 if going from Jpeg, 360 when going from Tif - reason is to have an even ratio for the program to interpolate pixels when resizing to 8x10).

If you have already tried this, I am out of ideas at this time.

[john_houghton]

Ballistic wrote:
The dots are quite visible and the color isn't perfect.
Which dots are these that are visible? It's best to talk about pixels in the image, and image resolution in terms of pixels per printed inch (ppi). Printers print many dots to replicate each pixel. If you are seeing ink dots, and the printer is set to its highest quality mode, there's not a lot you can do about it.

If the individual image pixels are visible, then you haven't enough pixels for that printed size. 200 pixels or more per linear printed inch should be enough for decent quality. Your S30 images should be 2048 x 1536 pixels, so at 6" x 4" this will give you around 350ppi, which is ample. In Photoshop, you can use the "scale to fit" option in printer setup as a convenient way to resize the image to fit the printer paper.

As to the colour problems, are you sure that the correct paper type has been selected for the paper you are using? Is it Lexmark paper? If so, it will probably have recommended printer driver settings listed somewhere. If you are not using Lexmark paper, then you may not get a good colour match.

John