I feel pretty dumb, I am a reasonably experienced and competent photographer, but for some reason I can't figure this out.

I need to prepare a sheet of 2" x 2" photos of my wife for a visa application. I take the picture at high resolution (about 3600 x 2700) and cut and paste it into my graphics program of choice (Paint.net). Of course the picture is gigantic, PDN says it is 50.7 x 38 inches, but that's no problem, I grab a corner of the picture and drag it down to 2" x 2", copy and paste it 19 times and voila!, I have an 8.5 x 11" page with 20 pictures on it.

And the resolution is crap. The re-sizing of the image is wrecking it, making it all fuzzy and jaggy.

Using the resizing tool in PDN gives the same result. Using resizing software (PictureResizer.exe, a free utility) gives the same result. Resizing seems to be the kiss of death.

What approach do I take to create crisp little 2" x 2" prints? Surprisingly, importing the full-res original picture into Microsoft Word, then dragging to re-size it to 2x2 gives better results than my graphics program, but the picture still looks better on my monitor than on paper. Some (most? all?) of the problem may be that I am printing with an inexpensive color laser printer (2400 x 600 dpi) on white bond paper. I doubt that I can find any of the special color laser photo paper here in Ajijic.

I can't help but think that my basic approach is wrong. Should I shoot from a distance at low-res on the camera so I can crop out just the head and shoulders and not have to re-size? That doesn't sound right. Maybe my Paint.net graphics program is the wrong tool? There is probably some simple, basic concept I am overlooking here, but I don't know what it is.

tanstaafl.

How many pixels are you reducing the image down to ? Your printer is probably around 300 pixels per inch, so you will want each picture to be around 600x600.

Andy seems to be on the right track. I would create a blank 2" x 2" canvas in Photoshop that has a resolution of 300 dpi, then drop my image into it as a layer and manually resize it using the transform tool. Once it looks good, flatten the image and save as a JPG. Then create the 8.5" x 11" canvas (still 300 dpi) and drop the 2" x 2" image into it and duplicate.

Doh! Of course. I was so focused on getting the image size correct that I completely ignored that I could also adjust the resolution (i.e., pixels per inch).

That fixed it. Thanks, Andy!

tanstaafl.

EDIT: re-did it at 600 pixels/inch (1200 x 1200 pixels) and the results were even better. I think that is the max my printer will do.

Usually, when doing something like that (assembling multiple images onto a page), you don't want to do it in a pixel-painting program.

I know you've already solved your problem, but in the future, you might get better results by placing the images into a desktop publishing program or a word processing program. That's the sort of thing I'd use Corel Draw for, usually.

The reason: No sense in trying to turn every dot on the page into a unique pixel in a huge page-sized pixel image file. Just duplicating the single photo in a page layout program means that the file only has to store the photo once instead of many times, and only has to send the photo to the printer's memory once instead of many times. I would also choose to use a page layout program because then I wouldn't have to worry about the photo's resolution when I resized it (page layout programs don't resample the pixels of the photos when you change their size).

The best bet is to use a program that's intended for laying up multiple photos on a page and includes templates for just that. It's a lot easier than even using a general-purpose page layout application.

This is built into photo programs like Lightroom, but there should also be a decent selection of stand-alone products, perhaps even some free ones.

As far as printing goes however, the printer is going to get the N-up data, not just a single photo, AFAIK.

Most page description languages built into printers and imagesetters have the ability to accept a single image that's then repeated, and a well written layout app will take advantage of this.

If you think about it, that's the definition of a font, too.