Fine-tune your inkjet photo printer

To get crisp, sharp photos, you must have a high enough print resolution. This is a measure of the number of pixels that will print across each inch of paper. If you have Adobe Photoshop Elements, you can see this information about an image by selecting Image > Resize > Image Size. If your image is 450 pixels wide, and the print resolution is set to 300 pixels per inch, the printed image will be 1.5 inches wide. This brings up an important point: an onscreen image and an image on paper are not the same thing.

For an illustration, try this simple test: Display a 450-pixel-wide image onscreen, and measure its width in inches. Perhaps it's 5 inches wide onscreen and looks very nice. Now, open the Image Size box and set the Document Size section's Width box to 5 inches. Getting those 450 pixels into a 5-inch print requires a print resolution of only 90 pixels per inch, and this will produce a fuzzy print. That, in turn, brings us back to the camera you're shooting the images with. Take advantage of all those megapixels by choosing the highest pixel dimensions possible for the images you'll want to print. If the original image is 3,000 pixels wide and you print at 300 pixels per inch, you'll get a nice 10-inch-wide print. If you print from the reduced-size image, you have two choices: a print that's tiny and sharp, or one that's large and blurry.