Using an online photo lab

With the advent of digital, online labs have come into their own. These labs are a great way to get good, quality prints cheaply. Since these labs are not dealing with customers face-to-face, they can save a lot of money and they pass that savings onto you.

The downside of using an online lab is that not all of them have good user interfaces and you have to upload your images to their web site which can be time-consuming. Also, if the image arrives and it's not to your liking, you have to mail it back at your own expense.

Resolution Guide

Most labs have a Resolution Guide to help you make sure your images have enough pixels to be printed. They often have little icons to warn you if your images don't have enough resolution for the size you've selected.

Here is a table of sizes that have worked well for us using a wide variety of labs and are easy to remember:

Ordering specialty items

While most online labs have guides to help you prepare your image properly for prints, they have very little information to guide you in preparing images to put on coffee mugs, magnets, aprons, etc. If you are going to order these items, and there is no documentation as to what size the image will be printed, you will save yourself a lot of heartache if you write to their customer support department first.

Beware the overprint

In order to make sure your image prints from one end of the paper to the other, most labs will “overprint.” That is, they will print the image slightly bigger than the paper. Be careful when cropping your image so make sure that toes, fingers, the top of the subject's head are not within half an inch of the edge or they may get chopped off!