photo calendar

[kib]

We're hoping to make one for Christmas.

1. Has anyone done this, do you have any pointers?

2. I chatted with someone at Instaprint and they suggested 300 DPI. These pix are all between 72 and 180. Is there any (free) way to change the DPI of a picture once it's been taken?

3. I played around with images all day, and they looked great on my laptop. Then I put them on a drive and up on the flat screen tv, and they were horribly over-saturated and cartoonish. Anyone know how I can prevent that from happening when they get printed?

TIA for any help, I like to point n shoot but that's as far as my knowledge extends. :)

[freshstart]

I haven't done one in 15 yrs, I'm no help. But I wanted to tell you, these are on Groupon and Livingsocial all the time for a very low price. I cruised through a bunch of offers when I was reading cybermonday emails.

[catherine]

Yes, I made one for my family for Christmas 2 years ago. I got the idea two days before Christmas and my adrenaline started running.. my son had asked for an inspirational calendar, and I love quotes, so I picked out my favorite quotes, matched them to my favorite family photos and voila! I used Snapfish, which was incredibly easy. I was dubious of how the quality would turn out but I was very satisfied. I was dubious I'd be able to get them back in time for Christmas. I uploaded the file and picked up the finished product in two hours at Walmart--I'm not kidding. (I hate Walmart but that day they were my friend).

I was thinking of doing the same thing this year--and knowing me, I'll probably get started around December 23.

In terms of your question about the resolution, I can't really answer that, but I do believe you're stuck with the low one. Can you print smaller pictures and put two or more on a page?

[SteveinMN]

We're hoping to make one for Christmas.

1. Has anyone done this, do you have any pointers?
DW has done this a couple of times now and was happy with the results. Most of the on-line photo services (Shutterfly, Walgreen's, CVS, etc.) can do it and make it relatively easy (though DW and Walgreen's iPad software don't seem to get along very well for some reason).


2. I chatted with someone at Instaprint and they suggested 300 DPI. These pix are all between 72 and 180. Is there any (free) way to change the DPI of a picture once it's been taken?
I don't know about free, but there is no good way to change picture DPI once it's been taken. That goes doubly so for images in JPEG format (for technical reasons). It is possible to find software which will up-res, but it does so by guessing at what colors the added pixels should be. The resulting image will look soft. That, however, may be preferable to looking jagged.


3. I played around with images all day, and they looked great on my laptop. Then I put them on a drive and up on the flat screen tv, and they were horribly over-saturated and cartoonish. Anyone know how I can prevent that from happening when they get printed?
This is the tough one to fix because there are lots of variables. You could check the picture settings on the TV to make them as neutral as possible. Most flat-screen TVs come out of the box set to a very saturated picture because it looks more impressive at first glance in the store. There should be a more-neutral setting available.

Similarly, you can check the laptop, which will rely on a color curve called gamma; most manufacturers set gamma to fairly neutral but some let users mess with the settings. To do the job at a more professional level, there is equipment and software that calibrates monitors, but it isn't cheap and it requires communication of color values throughout the publishing chain. For your purposes, setting things correctly on monitors set to flat should do the job.