It is one thing to be able to take great pictures with your digital camera and quite another to then produce fantastic photographic prints. In the old days of film most photographers passed on the responsibility of making a print to their local photo store. Most, that is, except for a few dedicated individuals who spent their hours in small darkrooms under stairs or in the attic.

Digital has changed all this. Now more shooters than ever before are creating their own prints. Gone are the dank and smelly darkrooms. Now the center of home or office print production sits squarely on the desk in the form of a table-top printer.

Printing Basics

There are several different printer technologies that can turn your digital pictures into photographs. The most popular, at the moment, is the Ink Jet (or Bubble Jet) printer, followed by Dye Sublimation and Laser machines.

Creating millions of colors from as little as four

Each of the printing technologies creates the illusion of millions of colors in the photograph by separating the picture into four separate base colors (some systems use six or seven colors). In most cases, these colors are Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. This type of separation is referred to as CMYK (where K stands for the black component), which has been the basis of newspaper and magazine printing for decades.

CMYK color >> Most printing systems are based on breaking the full color picture (a) down into several color parts. Here...