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Beyond the basics. Here are some tips that are worth knowing about if you're willing to work a little to improve your photos.

  • Print from an editing program. For- the best-quality output, move your photos to your computer and print from a photo-editing program. (PC Magazine's current Editors' Choice for a basic photo editor is Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0; see http://go.pcmag.com/elements3. ) Most high-end photo printers don't offer direct printing, because you get much better control over features like cropping, resizing, and color adjustment in a photo-editing program. With some printers, a photo-editing program will also let you print photos at a higher resolution than you could by printing directly from a camera or memory card.

  • Avoid compression woes. Most cameras default to—or are even limited to—saving pictures in a compressed JPG format. When you want the best possible photo quality, you should turn off compression, if you can. Never edit a compressed photo on your computer and then save it back to a compressed format. JPG is a lossy compression scheme—it loses information every time you save the file. If you edit a compressed file, save it in the image editor's native format or in a format like TIFF. Select no compression or a lossless compression option to avoid degrading the image further with recompression.

  • Explore your printer driver. Nearly every printer's driver offers settings that affect picture quality. They may let you choose between quality levels, and adjust brightness; contrast; red, green, and blue levels; and more. For the best possible output, it's worth investing the time to explore your driver. Experiment with each quality setting to see its effect on your photo output.