Printing Problems and Solutions

Many printing problems you'll experience will be specific to your particular printer and setup, so read your printer manual carefully and be sure to test before printing at the highest quality on expensive paper.

Prints Don't Appear Correctly on the Paper

You may have trouble getting prints to show in exactly the right location on the paper. Try these solutions to the problem:

• Set the paper size appropriately in the Paper menu in the Print dialog. This is essential for unusual paper sizes.

• Make sure the margins are set correctly for your printer and paper combination.

• Verify that you load paper into your printer properly. This solution helps particularly with unusual paper sizes.

Photos Print at Incorrect Sizes

Even if you ask iPhoto to print a standard size print, the image that comes out of the printer might not be the size you want. This can happen for a few reasons:

• Make sure your image is cropped to the appropriate aspect ratio. Otherwise, iPhoto shrinks the image proportionally to make it fit, adding borders in one dimension to accommodate the size change.

• Changing the layout to print multiple pages per sheet of paper in the Advanced options of the Print dialog will likely result in unpredictable photo sizes.

• Changing the scale in the Page Setup dialog has no effect.

Poor Print Quality

The main complaint with printing occurs when print quality doesn't meet your expectations. Here are a few suggestions for addressing print quality problems:

• Make sure your inkjet cartridges aren't clogged. Once my black ink cartridge clogged and it took me an hour to figure out that the clog caused color photos to print oddly. Your printer manual should tell you how to clear clogs.

• Change your ink cartridges. It's possible that one is low on a specific color and not yet reporting the problem.

• Use different paper. You'd be amazed how much better print quality is on paper designed for photo printing.

• Make sure your paper is loaded correctly to print on the printable side. It's usually whiter or glossier than the other side.

• Make sure you select the appropriate settings in the Print dialog for your printer to use high-quality mode.

• If iPhoto put a low-resolution warning icon on the picture in the Print dialog's small preview, there isn't enough data in the image to print at the size you requested. Print at a smaller size. See "Dealing with Warning Icons," later in this chapter.

• CMYK files, which you can create in some programs (but won't come from a standard digital camera), may not print correctly in iPhoto. Try converting them to RGB.

• Verify that the problems aren't inherent to the original image. If so, you may have to edit the image in another program to correct the issue.