I was trying to copy a 4 x 6 picture and print 8 x 10 using a brother 255cw printer and microsoft photo gallery. Although I copy and print what I think should be 8 x 10 they come out original size. What steps should I be doing?
When you say “copy”, what do you mean? Are you scanning a 4x6 print or are you trying to print an 8x10 from an existing digital file?
What exactly are you doing to the file before printing it? How are you enlarging it?
I am scanning a 4 x 6 picture that I took and attempting to print that as an 8 x 10. I am using the crop tool available with Microsoft Photo Gallery
I don’t think the crop resizes, it just adjusts the proportion.
Try saving it once you adjust the aspect ratio then open it in a word processor and resize it manually.
If you need a good tool, FastStone, GIMP and Picassa all have good free tools.
Try this:
- Crop out the white borders. Save changes.
- Open the picture using Windows Photo Viewer
- Select print. Select printer and paper. They’ll give you options like 1 print per page, 3 prints per page, contact sheet print etc. Choose 1 print per page.
2.5. Make sure the margins of your printer are set so that the printable area is 8x10. On typical letter paper, that would be 0.25 inches on both the (long) sides and 0.5 inches on the top and bottom (aka shorter sides).
- Trim off the excess after printing.
You’re not enlarging it, you’re just printing the same size image onto larger paper. But I’m not familiar with MPG. Look for a resizing option that you’re not using.
I would say use a proper image-editing program. There are plenty of free ones. Then use the resize option, which will usually give you options of pixels, inches/cm, and/or dots per inch. (These are obviously a function of one another - it you have an image 720 pixels by 576 pixels and set the resolution to 72 dpi, the image size will be 10 x 8 inches (but it won’t print very well). If you set the resolution to 300 dpi (a good value for printing), then the image size will be 2.4 x 1.92 inches - pretty tiny.
So, assuming you want to print at 300 dpi at 10 x 8 inches, all you do is resample the image to 3000 x 2400 pixels, and make sure that the image size is set to 10 x 8 inches (and/or resolution is set to 300 dpi - this is effectively the same thing).
If the OP is scanning the picture themselves, they should choose the highest dpi to scan at that they can. This will enable them to then print at the best quality to the size they want.
Scanning a 4x6 at 200% of the original size at 800dpi, for example,will result in an 8x12 image. Crop this to 8x10 and print at 300-350 dpi.
Better to lose pixels when resizing than trying to create them through resampling.
Does your printer have a preview feature? If so you should be able to change the printing percentages there.
Agreed. I missed the bit about it being a scanned picture.