How to prepare an image for printing at home

Home printing is set up in one window in Paint by Zaweba: choose File > Print (Ctrl+P) and you get a live preview of the page as you change the settings. You pick the printer and paper, then fit, fill, actual size or a custom size, set margins or borderless, and add crop marks, a border or a caption. What you see in the preview is what comes out of the printer.

Most home printing problems come from guessing. The picture prints too small, gets cropped at the edges, or comes out darker than on screen. A live preview and a few checks before you press Print sort out most of that.

Getting the size right

Choose the printer and the paper size first, any size the printer offers or a custom one, and set the orientation to match the picture. Then pick how the picture should sit on the page. Fit makes it as large as possible without cropping. Fill covers the whole page and trims what doesn't fit, which is what you want for edge to edge prints. Actual size prints at the document's real size, and custom scale or size lets you set an exact measurement.

The 9-point anchor and offsets decide where on the page the picture goes, which is handy when you want a small print in a corner to save paper, or need it centred exactly.

Resolution and sharpness

For prints you'll look at closely, the picture needs enough pixels for the print size. Fine detail suffers when a small image is stretched across a big page. If the preview looks soft at your chosen size, print smaller, or accept that a phone snapshot shared online won't make a sharp large print.

Sharpen a little for print. Ink spreads slightly into paper, so a picture that looks just right on screen often prints a touch soft. A gentle sharpen on a copy of the layer before printing helps.

Colour and brightness

Screens glow, paper doesn't, so prints often look darker than the screen. If yours consistently do, lift the brightness slightly on a print copy rather than changing the original. Colour management and hard proofing are available in the Print window, which helps if you have a profile for your printer and paper.

Greyscale prints a colour picture in black and white without changing the file, useful for a quick draft.

Extras on the page

Margins and borderless decide how close to the edge the picture goes, as far as your printer allows. Crop marks show where to cut when you print a small picture on a bigger sheet. A border and a caption are handy for gifts or labelling test prints. If the document has several artboards, all artboards as pages prints each one on its own sheet, and copies sets how many.

Once you've found settings that work, Print One Copy uses the last settings straight away, so a reprint is one click. Save as PDF writes the same pages to a PDF, which is useful for sending to a print shop or printing elsewhere.

Several pictures on a page

For passport photos or a page of small prints, use File > Automate > Picture Package instead. It lays out fixed sizes on A4, Letter or A3 as a new document you then print.

Paint by Zaweba is free software for Windows and needs no internet connection, so you can print family photos without uploading them anywhere.