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I have been kicking around starting to sell prints of some of my photos and that has got me thinking about what I would have to do to figure out how to do such a thing.

It seems there are different things to think about:

1. Making sure your monitor is properly calibrated and that you have a good color profile to use when preparing your images for the printing service.

2. What service to use to offer prints. Right now I am leaning towards Smugmug. They have a pretty slick setup for people wanting to sell prints but I also need to check into Kodak Easy Share Gallery and Ritzpix. Smugmug seems the best out of the 3 in this area from the little bit of research I have done. They integrate with your website, allow unlimited storage of photos and make it easy to set your own prices, check stats, etc. If you have other suggestions let me know.

3. What pictures to choose. This is a tough one. What is good? What is OK? What is crap? What would people buy? With unlimited storage it isn’t as big a deal but people should find pictures that are engaging and they would like to own and they should be able to find them quickly, without having to sort through a bunch of so-so pictures.

4. How to finish a photo. This is also tough. There are different things that need to be done, things like sharpening pictures, modifying colors, fixing exposure, and that is one side of preparing an image, but also there is presentation. Do you add some kind of artificial matting by stretching the canvas? How can you make the picture look finished? If you go to photo.net and other pro photo sites and look at the galleries the pictures look so finished. They just look so well presented, if that makes any sense.

This is the area I want to write a bit about.

WARNING: This is not an area I am very knowledgeable about which is one of the reasons I wanted to write about it. I find that I learn quite a bit when I write about something. By the way, I used Photoshop CS3 to do all of this. Some ideas I have to make a photo have a built in frame or matte look would be:

To make this I cropped my picture to look more panoramic, then enlarged the canvas an inch or so on the top and two sides and three inches on the bottom. I then added another layer, selected a very thin border on the outside edge and painted it blue. After that I burned it in spots all around and then went to the Blending options of the layer and added a bevel and emboss with contour and a drop shadow. I used Myriad Pro to add the text and then beveled and embossed that with texture and contour and satin.

This one was minimalistic. I added a small border (by enlarging the canvas) that was bigger on the top and bottom than on the two sides. I added another layer and then on the original layer added the bevel and emboss with contour and a drop shadow. Not sure about the text but I think it was still Myriad Pro.

On this photo I added canvas, the bevel and emboss and made it black, obviously, and then added text with the orator font. The title might be too strong. I don’t want it to overwhelm the photo.

Here I used one of our textures from the gallery and added the picture to it in a layer. I did the same bevel and emboss as with the others on the picture layer. The font is Rockwell regular and the white might be too much. I am not sure if the texture works here but the slight lomographic look of the photo seems to work with the grain of the border. I could also change the blending option here to make the grain of the background show through if I wanted, but I did not want to spoil the actual photo.

Just experimenting. I will probably try out and post about a few more things like this. It seems important to find the right look for a certain photo. It would be easy to overwhelm the picture if it is done incorrectly. If you have any suggestions please let me know.

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