Personalizing a design with your photograph is fun. You can get your photos added to save the dates, holiday cards, thank you cards, and more. As always, you can pick out a design from the website, or ask for something new. Photographs can be cropped, converted to black and white, given borders, lightened, and more.

You can mail a photograph to me to be scanned in. Or, you can email a photograph. If you decide to email a photograph, though, you want to make sure you are emailing the high resolution version of your photograph. You may not realize this, but if you see a photograph on a website- this is a small (low resolution) version of the photograph. The file you want to use for printing the photograph will be much larger.

Where do you get the high resolution file of your photograph? If you have a photographer, email them to ask about getting a high resolution copy of the photograph. If you took the photograph with a digital camera: when you plug in the camera, look for a folder where the photograph files are stored.

If you have uploaded the photograph files to a place like "shutterfly", the copy you see on their website will be the low resolution version. They will still have the high resolution on file to actually print. Because these original files are too large to easily view on a computer monitor, places like "shutterfly" create smaller versions of the photo for you to look at online.

Customers who are just learning about the resolution of digital photograph files often ask: "Can't I just enlarge the photograph to fit?". The answer is no. I can take any file and increase it's size, yes. But enlarging a low resolution photograph will just lead to a pixelated and blurry print out. You definitely want to get the high resolution copy of your photograph for printing.

When picking out a photograph for a design, think about how your photograph will fit. For example, if you want to have your photograph set as the entire background of a magnet or card, you definitely want to pick something with a lot of background space. Consider whether the design displays a photograph in a short and wide space, or, a long and tall space, and then try to pick out something that will fit in that area. Cropping a photograph is easy, and most photographs will fit in a given design, but every now and again there is trouble with fitting a design into a given space. A good rule of thumb- the more background space in the original photograph, the easier it will be to crop it into the right shape.

The 3 keys to a good print: