The Aladdin machine's software is rather slow, especially the
cropping and zooming ware. The RC prints come out of the same
machine used for film based prints, so they have two liabilities - no
glossy paper choice and about 12 years longevity before fading begins
when constantly exposed to normal room light even if framed under
glass. At my Wal*Mart there's also becoming a serious waiting time -
almost entirely spent waiting for those before me in line who've
discovered this wonderful machine.
You can also consider learning to use the crop tool as Christiane
just quite clearly described, and burning CDs of your cropped images
as TIFFs at 300dpi and taking your CD to Wal*Mart for printing.
Color profiles for the machine are available on the PopPhoto site and
I suspect other places, although I find that the standard "Adobe RGB
(1998)" profile seems to work just fine.
Using PS 5.5 last night I discovered the following:
Hit the "C" key to select the crop tool, pull down the "Window" menu
and select "Show Crop Tool" if it's not already showing along the
right side of your screen. Click on the box called "Fixed Target
Size" and then enter 10 and make the choice inches, and 8, again
making the choice inches.
Under resolution put in "300", and choose pixels.
Apply the crop tool from a bottom corner of approximately where you
want the crop to begin. The crop tool will retain the ratio of 8x10.
Once you have approximately selected the area you wish to include,
hold down the Option key (on a Mac) and move the crop box to correct
for the exact placement of the edges of the crop.
Once you've refined the perimeter of your crop, hit return. PS will
upsample your cropped area and resize your image to 8x10 at 300 dpi.
SaveAs and rename your file. Burn a CD with the renamed file and
take it to Wal*Mart, but you must burn it as ISO 9660, partly because
the Wal*Mart computers are PCs and partly because you can continue to
add files to the CD until it's full as long as you select Burn
Session.
One other thing - the PCs at Wal*Mart don't understand grayscale
mode, so if you want a b&w print, pull down "Images" and select
"Mode", then select "Desaturate". That will make the image appear to
be b&w while retaining its RGB basis.
--
Emily L. Ferguson
elf@cape.com 508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races, press photography
Beetle cats on the web at:
http://www.vsu.cape.com/~elf
http://www.beetlecat.org/store.html#yrbook
