Tricks for Printing Beautiful Frame-Worthy Photos at Home…

 

Hi friends and welcome to my newly redecorated blog!  I am so excited to get installed this morning after months of designing it with the awesome Lindsay Bolton from Chena Design.  A big thank you to my webmaster Tony Oravet from Evenpar Solutions for handling the install and all the technical stuff! I have worked with Lindsay and Tony for several years now and I really don’t know what I would do without them.  These two are the best there is when it comes to website design and support and I am so lucky to get to work with them.

My goal in the revamp is to really make it so much easier for you all to find past projects and categories.  I still have some tweaking to do but I really hope it’s more functional for you to find things.  I am so excited about the new colors and design and I hope you like it.

So on to today’s project;

This is another project from my stairwell/mudroom revamp that I shared last week:

 

Today I wanted to share my little tricks for printing gorgeous high quality photographs for framing at home. You guys are going to think I’m crazy but I prefer this finish and look over professionally printed photographs and I’ll go into why that is in a second. First, let me just show you a close up of my printed photos in frames:

 

 

Let me premiss this whole post by saying that if you have a printer that’s more than 5 years old, you will probably not get the beautiful quality that you see in my photos. You will still be able to do this but so much has changed quality-wise in printers, especially in the last 2-3 years that have really taken printing to the next level.  Anything more recent, you should be able to get this level of quality.

There’s actually two tricks that I do for printing this high quality print and the first thing I do is that I print my photographs on smooth white card stock without the linen/fiber lines.  Some white card stock has those fiber/linen lines and I use “smooth card stock” and should always say that on the package.  Since I print so many photographs this way, I buy in bulk with 250 pieces like this from Amazon:

 

 

There is just something about printing photographs on white smooth card stock that’s like magic.  I have no clue why it is but the smooth card stock absorbs the ink in a really vibrant and beautiful way that looks it’s a professional art print.  Now, these are not glossy at all and are very matte, which is another reason why they look so professional on the card stock:

 

I also print party invitations and free printables on smooth white card stock and they always look like I had them professionally done.

The last trick to printing is that most people don’t know it but when you hit print and the screen set up for printing pops up, you can actually go into advanced settings or printer preferences and change the printer default from “normal” to “best” quality.  All printers are defaulted to “normal” or everyday printing, which conserves the ink for you and uses just the minimum amount.  You will notice a tremendous difference in printing photos and printables if you switch it and choose “best” quality.  This way, you get the printer’s best capability and that extra ink!

If you do these two things, you will be so amazed by the end result and your prints will look amazing framed.  One last tip, I like to print either full-page or 8 x 10 size of my photos and then crop them with an oversized mat.  This also gives you a really pretty look and it looks so dramatic framed:

 

 

Thanks for hanging out with me today and I hope you can use these little tricks.

Cheers!

Cyndy