We have all printed out pictures and hung then on a wall. In recent years this past time have become mundain when compared to the "specialty" items you can now put your favorite photos on.

With the growth of digital images in our society, we have seen a huge surge in new ways to display out images. No longer is it just enough to print a picture and hang it on the wall. Today we can put them on our beach bag, or coffee mug, turn them into 3D art or make window stickers out of them. 

This holiday season while you are considering what you want to do for gifts, consider the incredible diversity of photo gifts. The portability  of digital images, has allowed us to do more with them than ever before .






How might you want to prepare your images for such specialized printing? Well a good image manipulation program would be a great start. As in the past we recommend Photoshop Elements or full Photoshop it's self. 

Be sure to get your images into their highest possible resolution for the size they are being printed in. The human eye is able to see 276 dpi. So a resolution higher than that is where you would want to go. Most print houses will gladly accept your images at 300 dpi in a jpg format. In Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, or even by right clicking on an image you can discover the properties of that image. You will see the height and width which should be in the final size you wish to produce and then the DPI will be listed. Again this should be at least 300 @ the final size of your print. It should look something like this.  8 in x 10 in dpi 300. Same is true for a 5x7 or a wall print that is 20 x30 inches in size. 300 is your minimum DPI.  If you are uploading your images to a website, be sure they will allow images at this resolution. If not search out another provider that will, the last thing you want is a pixelated holiday gift.

Now that you have your images in the right size at 300 dpi you are ready to start making some personalized fun.
Several places offer specialty products, snapfish, photobucket and others are ready to serve your needs. These personalized gifts are a great way to insure that your family and friends won't have to return your gift because it is the wrong size or worse "regift" it because they got two of the same thing.

Have fun with your digital images this holiday season and share that fun on a travel mug or a environmentally freindly grocery bag that people can use year round. - Aloha

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