Printing questions

[yetishot]

A few questions if I may. First, would there be much of a quality difference from printing my pictures through smugmug(I have an account there) versus A drugstore printer like CVS or walmart? Second, Should I be printing the jpegs or raw versions? Thanks for any info or helpful links you might have,

Shawn

[OldClicker]

As for the second part:

You cannot print a RAW- it isn't usable until it is rendered. You then save it as an image file such as jpg, tiff or psd.

You will need to give the printer whatever file format they require or else they will just convert it anyway.

TF

[yetishot]

As for the second part:

You cannot print a RAW- it isn't usable until it is rendered. You then save it as an image file such as jpg, tiff or psd.

You will need to give the printer whatever file format they require or else they will just convert it anyway.

TF

Ok, I did not know that. So J-peg it is

[mjs1973]

To answer the first part of your question about printer quality, the answer is maybe. You should do a test and upload the same file to each company and order the same print. You should be able to see a difference between them. I did this type of test a few years ago with a few different online printers. The differences were very noticeable!

[freygr]

No outside vendor can print RAW files. For the highest quality image to be printed, you adjust the RAW file then save as a 16bit per color TIFF file. But may vendors can't handle this type of file. For the best quality JPG file you have to be very careful!
1) Copy the JPG (RAW or TIFF is the best) file to your work area and rename the file.
2) After opening the file for editing NEVER resave as JPG or other lousy format, only TIFF, PSD or BMP
3) Only after you are done Editing then you save as JPG with the Quality settings at Maximum, and don't forget to resave it as a TIFF, PSD or BMP
4) Take your edited image to the printer

Note JPG files are only 8 bit per color, and the compression throws away color and resolution data. Most persons will not notice the loss but repeated openings and savings will even be noticeable over time. To preserve quality the close function must be used as the save function compresses the image data and overwrites the old image data, each time the image is compressed you lose more color and resolution.