kjp

Last Thursday (who said a blog is supposed to be up to date?) I got a whole batch of photos printed. It was the first time I have had any of the pictures printed off from my camera. I'm happy with the results. Almost all of them are up on my wall / the fridge. Heaps better background than "cream" or whatever the colour of the paint is called... A few things on the process:

Cost.
I went to Kmart in Chermside to get them done. It was 44c per 6" x 4" image to get them printed. You could pay 75c (I think) to print them using the machine yourself (ie: get them instantly). I got the people behind the counter to print the images at 44c and paid an extra $1 to get them done within the hour - probably the cheapest option (especially as I had other things to do at the shops) - better than going back to the shops the next day. They charge a fair bit for big images. It cost $4.42 for the 8" x 6" image (not sure what this compares like for traditional film enlargements). A4 sized images were charged at $15 (too expensive, I thought). At a camera shop just down the hallway they were doing A4 images for $10, I think. So you want to have a good image for enlargement.

Image Quality.
I've looked at the pictures from a distance of 1m and 10 cm (for a couple of them) - I can't pick out any differences from the images that are on my screen. 3.2 MPixels is good.

Image Size.
I forgot that my images were going to be printed out at 6" x 4" (the normal photo size). All of my images were at 4:3 aspect ratio. ie: I had the choice of a while border at the sides or chop the top and bottom off. And for some stupid reason I chopped off the top and bottom of all of them. In all but one case this didn't matter. Actually, chopping off was probably the better choice. But in future, I'll prepare the images to have the correct aspect ratio before I take them to be printed. The only thing that I have to be careful about here is that I don't reduce the quality of the image (ie: multiple saving of a jpg potentially looses detail). So, I'd probably convert it to a png first, do my cropping, then convert back. Or - convert it to a png, do the cropping, and burn the png to a cdrom. This would require that the machine accepts png files - but is probably the best in terms of editting images.

Transfering Images.
I used my 32MB compact flash card to get the images there (a bit less risky then taking them on my 256MB card). For my camera (Canon Powershot A75), it can upload images that were taken by the camera and that haven't been since modified. The program does not allow you to upload images that have been modified since the downloading of the image to your computer. However, there is a way around this (this was required for one image that was a photo I had taken but that had had horns and a pitchfork paintbrushed to it...). I think that the upload program (ZoomBrowser) looks at the EXIF information contained in the image file. Presumably, it looks at the Camera Make / Model information, and possibly the "Makernotes" section of the EXIF information. I used a very nifty program Exifer to copy the EXIF information from the original photo to the modified image. After that the file uploaded to my camera (to the flash card) fine. However, after disconnecting the camera from the computer and viewing the images on the camera, I got an "Incompatible JPEG format" error when viewing the modified image. I suppose this is the camera's way of saying that the image doesn't match the EXIF thumbnail / was of a different aspect ratio.

Another way around this camera / program limitation would be to get a flash card reader that would stick into the back of my computer (and avoid my camera all together). But this would seem to be an extra bit of money that doesn't need to be spent.

One thing that I didn't realise is that there is an EXIF thumbnail contained within the EXIF information. Makes sense, really. In my case, the EXIF thumbnail and a thumbnail generated from the file didn't match - which was a bit weird, but it didn't cause any problems at any stage.