iLife ’11: How to Print Pictures from iPhoto

10 of 12 in Series: The Essentials of Sharing and Presenting Photos with iPhoto

Printing pictures from iPhoto in iLife is just about the easiest thing you can do. When using a printer with iPhoto (as with most Mac applications), you can access page layouts and printer-quality features in the Print dialog. Browse Events, Photos, Faces, Places, Recent collections, or photo albums in the Source pane, and select one or more pictures to print.

After you specify your printer settings and customize your photos, click the Print button to start the printing operation. The standard Print dialog appears; click the down arrow next to the Printer pop-up menu to see more options:

*Printer and Presets pop-up menus: You can change the printer and the printer’s presets.
*Copies: Specify the number of copies — if you print a set of photos, this number specifies the number of copies in the entire set. Click the Collated option to automatically collate pages for multiple-page prints.
*Pages: Click the All option for iPhoto to print all pages in a multiple-page print, or specify a page range with the From option to print only the range of pages.

To save the pages as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file that other people can open using Preview (on a Mac), Adobe Reader (on a Mac or PC), or the Safari browser (or another browser that supports PDF), choose Save As PDF from the PDF pop-up menu in the lower left corner of the Print dialog. You can then click the Save button to save the PDF file.

In the center of the Print dialog, the pop-up menu that’s usually set to iPhoto also enables you to adjust many other settings. Here are some tips for choosing settings:

To change the layout before printing or saving as a PDF file, choose Layout from the center pop-up menu. You can then set the pages per sheet, choose a border, and select the Reverse Page Orientation (horizontal to vertical or vice versa) option to change which end of the page comes out of the printer first.
With some printers you can specify a perfect match with the type of paper you’re using by choosing Paper Type/Quality from the center pop-up menu and choose a printer-specific paper type (such as HP Premium Plus Photo Paper, for my HP PSC 1600) from the Paper Type pop-up menu (not all printers offer this pop-up menu).
You can set the quality of the print job (Fast Draft, Normal, or Best, for example) from the Quality pop-up menu.
You can also choose Color Matching or Paper Handling or other types of options.
For adaptive lighting, photo brightening, smoothing, sharpness, and automatic red-eye removal, choose Real Life Digital Photography from the center pop-up menu.
To see a summary of all options and settings, choose Summary from the center pop-up menu.)

If you run out of ink for your printer, iPhoto provides the convenient Supplies button in the lower left corner of the Print window. The button launches your browser and goes directly to the Apple Store printing-supplies page for your chosen printer.