It's MY Party Supply

Picking a photo to use for your personalized party supplies can be really hard! If you are anything like me you have tons and tons of amazing photos of the birthday boy or girl that you think would look amazing on a dinner plate or on an invitation, right? Well hold your horses, not all of those photos are suitable for your party supplies. While they may look nice in your picture frames, you need to consider some things when it comes to picking one suitable for printing.

What makes a good photo for party supplies?

Crisp, Clear Images. When you are looking through all the photos on your computer, the first thing you need to look for an image that is crisp and clear. Avoid any action shots you’ve taken of your child – they tend to look blurry when printed. The best images are ones where your child is holding still for the photo. You want pictures where your son or daughter is posing with their full face to the camera – think school photos. In fact, if you have a CD from your child’s school photographer those would work great for party supplies!

High Resolution. Make sure you choose a photo that is at least 1500 x 1500  pixels. This works out to 4 to 8 megapixels. Just remember, the larger you need the image to print, the higher the resolution you will need. So, if you are printing personalized birthday banners, your photo needs to be a higher resolution than if you are printing a dinner plate. If you are taking a special photo especially for your party supplies, make sure that you read your camera’s owners manual so that you can properly set the resolution to take the right sized photos.

Choose Color. Let me tell you about my very first blunder when it came to printing party supplies. It was my son’s first birthday and I decided to use one of my artsy black and white photos for his party supplies. It was adorable and so classy! But, while it looked amazing in the frame on my desk, it looked horrible on the invitations! These beautiful, colorful invitations featured a plain, blah picture of my child. Bottom line is pick a color photo of your child – one where the background isn’t too busy – after all we want to make sure your child is the focus, right?

What photos should I avoid?

Action Shots. Like I stated earlier, these tend to print blurry so avoid these.

Grainy Photos. Typically you will find that if you aren’t using enough lighting when you take the photo, the image turns out grainy. But, when you are viewing them on your computer monitor they look just fine. So, how do you tell? This is an easy tip: Make sure that you zoom in to the photo and check the main focus areas like the nose and the eyes. If your photo is suitable for printing it should be clear no matter how close you zoom in. If you stick with high resolution images, you shouldn’t have a problem.

Scanned Images. Scanned images do not tend to look very good because you again have the grainy issue. So, stay away from them whenever possible.

Dark or Shadowed Photos. Make sure to pay attention to your child’s face. Is there any shadow there? You need to make sure that your child’s face is well lit. Photos taken without a flash should not be considered.

What about photos from my mobile phone?

This is a very common question. After all, many of our photos are now taken with our mobile phones. So, the short answer is yes, you can use images on your party supplies that you have taken with your mobile phone. However, there is a catch to this answer. Many phones take low resolution images which we have learned are not suitable for printing. Read your owners manual and make sure that any photo you use from a mobile phone needs to be taken on a device that has at least 4 megapixel photo capabilities.