FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
HOW DO I GET MY PICTURES TO YOU?
HOW DO I WORK OUT WHAT YOU'LL CHARGE?
IS THERE A MINIMUM QUANTITY FOR AN ORDER?
CAN I HAVE A LARGE PRINT MADE FROM A SMALL PRINT?
WHAT DO "HIGH-RESOLUTION AND "LOW-RESOLUTION" MEAN?
WILL THE COLOR LOOK THE SAME IN PRINT AS ON MY SCREEN?
YOU HAVEN'T ANSWERED MY QUESTION.
HOW DO I GET MY PICTURES TO YOU?
The simplest way is to attach them to an email if the photos are already in digital format.
If you only have printed photos, negatives or slides, you can send them to us by registered post and we will return them in the same way.
If you have a large number of digital photos for me to work on, sending them on CD by registered post will also be the easiest method.
You can have your finished photos or artwork in digital format, sent by email or on CD via registered mail.
Alternatively, you can choose to have us send you high quality prints on photographic paper or prints on canvas, framed or unframed.
HOW DO I WORK OUT WHAT YOU'LL CHARGE?
Check out our basic price list. If you have a special request which isn't covered there, send us an email with either a low-resolution version of the photo you want us to work on, or a description of what you'd like us to do; we'll let you know what we can do with the photo, talk to you about your preferred shipping method, and give you a final quote.
IS THERE A MINIMUM QUANTITY FOR AN ORDER?
No, there's no minimum. We're quite happy to do just one photo if that is all you currently want done.
Yes, if you have a lot of photos to be done, we'll work out a special rate for you. If a lot of them are just small touch-ups, you'll find it to be very inexpensive.
CAN I HAVE A LARGE PRINT MADE FROM A SMALL PRINT?
If you have the negative from which a small print was made, we can do a high-resolution scan, complete any work which is required, and then make a large print from it.
If you don't have the original negative, but only a small print, it will give poor results if you make a large print, as the extra detail can't appear from nowhere. (See the next question.)
If you really want a large print made from a small one, we recommend having it processed as an oil or watercolor artwork, where the fine detail typical of a photo becomes somewhat more blurred in the brushstrokes and so can still give a good result.
WHAT DO "HIGH-RESOLUTION AND "LOW-RESOLUTION" MEAN?
The "resolution" of an image is essentially a measure of the amount of detail you can see in it. Think of a photograph in a newspaper: from a distance it looks like a clear image, but if you look at it through a magnifying glass, you can see that it's actually made up of a lot of small dots, each one of which is a single shade of grey.
The "size" of a digital image is measured in pixels, where a "pixel" (short for "picture element") is a single point or dot in the image. Each such pixel, like each dot in a newspaper photo, is one single color; the image is created by putting pixels of different colors together, and the more there are, the finer the "grain" of the image. The lower the resolution, the easier it is to see the dots by zooming in on the image—and the worse the image will look if it's blown up to large size.
Low-resolution photos may have 72 or 150 such dots per inch (dpi), and be only a few hundred pixels in width and height. High-resolution photos will have a dpi of 300 or above, and be thousands of pixels in width and height, which means that the image files will be correspondingly larger. The size of a digital file is measured in units called bytes; modern digital cameras can produce images over 12 megabytes (millions of bytes, abbreviated MB) in size per photo, whereas a low-resolution photo may only be a hundred kilobytes (thousands of bytes, abbreviated KB) in size. (Image files are generally much bigger than text files; a picture really is worth a thousand words.)
The images on this website are all low-resolution—fine for viewing in small size on a screen, not good for printing out or looking at close detail on.
If you want to send family snapshots to all and sundry by email, it's best to send low-resolution versions. The smaller file size means both that they'll download faster and that it will be easier to view each one on a single screen. The same rule applies if you want to display them, for instance, in an online photo album.
As a general rule, though, if you do make smaller copies of your photos for emailing or posting online, you should always keep a copy of the original full-size one somewhere in case you ever want to print it on photographic paper. Once you've lost the detail that was in the original image, there's no way to recover it from low-resolution copies.
If you want to send us a photo for evaluation, we recommend sending a copy that you've saved at about 640 x 480 pixels in size. If you aren't sure how to do this, don't worry—send it to us any old size. And either way, when we actually go to work on your photo, we'll ask you to send us the highest-resolution version you have.
WILL THE COLOR LOOK THE SAME IN PRINT AS ON MY SCREEN?
Almost certainly not. One reason is simply that not all computer screens show colors in exactly the same way. But the most important reason is that your screen shows you colors built from combinations of red, green, and blue light, and the rules for mixing ink (and paint) colors are the opposite of those for mixing light. Mixing equal amounts of red, green, blue light will produce white light; the absence of any light produces black. Ink, though, doesn't produce light but only reflects it—and when you mix two colors of ink, the resulting mixture reflects less light than either color alone. If you want part of a printed image to be white, you have to start with white paper and print no ink on that part of the image. If you mix all of the print colors, you don't get white the way you do with light; you get a rich, deep black.
What this means is that colors which, on your screen, look bright and glowing, will always looker duller and less intense in print. Certain shades that can be produced on a screen are very difficult to reproduce with inks, so if exact color replication is very important to you, please let us know in advance. We will then let you know how much variation there is likely to be, and do our best to satisfy your needs.
YOU HAVEN'T ANSWERED MY QUESTION.
Then by all means contact us, and we'll do our best to give you an answer!
Unless it's about the distance in centimeters from the Earth to the moon. For that kind of question, we recommend Google. You'll find your answer a lot faster.
Although, now that we've mentioned it, the distance from the Earth to the moon varies between 36,310,400,000 and 40,569,600,000 cm (14,295,433,070 and 15,972,283,464 inches), as the moon's orbit is elliptical. Incidentally, according to NASA, the moon is receding from the Earth at a rate of 3.8 cm (1.496 inches) per year.