Friday, May 15, 2009

Grazing and Printing...

Totally love the Graze box that I got yesterday. Fresh pineapple (yum!), Japanese Rice Cracker Mix (so nice and really fun to try!) and some tasty BBQ almonds. Can't wait for my next box :) If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out this post (if you're in the UK, you can get your first box free and second box half price with the code I posted, no obligation, so definitely worth a try!)

Now, Mikaela left me the following comment on Wednesday evening:
"Hi, great blog you have and lots of beautiful inspiration! I see that you use a lot of digital images and I wonder if you could help me with one thing. What settings do you use to print them out. I would like to try printing out digital images and then color them with promarker's. Do you know which settings and paper to use for that? Thanks"

Right, let's think about my process. First of all I would open a program of your choice (I use Photoshop Elements 6 at the moment). Create a new document that suits your printer. So if you're in Europe etc you would create a blank A4 document or in the US a Letter Size document. Open your chosen images (might be one or several in a kit) and drag them to arrange them how you like to have them on your document.

(A cute kit by Kay Miller which I have my eye on...)

Now to the printing. The settings you choose based on your PAPER. This is very important. I would recommend using the same brand paper as your printer. But of course you can experiment with some cheaper brands too. I have a Canon printer so I try to stick to Canon paper as much as I can. Then read on the packet for the exact name of your paper and choose this setting when you print. If you have gone for a "cheaper" brand then just use the appropriate "general setting" like "glossy photo paper", "matte photo paper" etc.

If I print something to use on a scrapbooking page, I would generally print onto good quality smooth white cardstock. For cards I would normally use a "matte photo paper"...though occasionally I do print onto smooth white card or "glossy photo paper".

Now you mention wanting to colour your images in with pens afterwards - this is a tricky area and I'm not 100% expert on this so I would advice you to do a little more investigation than just trusting what I say here LOL! But I do know that ink jet printer ink bleeds if you get it wet so that would obviously not be good for colouring in and accidentally touching the printed lines with your pen. I do believe that laser printers do not bleed, though maybe that's not the case for all of them. I'd do a little more research on this to be sure. Smooth cardstock or even watercolour paper might be nice to try and print on.

Hope this was of some help for you or anyone else out there wondering how to print out stuff from digital kits :)

No comments: