What's the best way to print out reference photos?

I'm often amazed at the reference pics I often see printed out. Does anyone have a suggestion for some free program I can use for this?

I have a colour plotter (24"x36") which would be perfect for this, but the only thing I ever do is AutoCAD, so I don't really know much about formatting photos.

Thoughts?

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk

I have lots of A4 display books filled with printed out photos of spaceships that I find inspiring.
I use the free program inkscape to lay out the pics usually two on an A4 page and then directly print it onto matte photo paper.
Once that sheet is printed I delete those photos and line up and scale two new ones.
I drag and drop a pile of photos onto the inkscape work space around the printable page as unfortunately inkscape does not handle more than one page.
I save a set of printing parameters that include the paper type, any contrast or brightness adjustments etc and re-load those settings every time I do a print run.
I also only use highest resolution pics I can find using the "large" search tool in Google images.

mung

You'll need to examine the resolution of each image before printing it. As a general rule, you need at least 150 ppi (pixels per inch) in order to get a decent print. 300 ppi is ideal for a high-resolution print.

So, for example, if you want your printed image to be 5 X 7 inches (h X w) at 300 ppi, the image needs to be 1500 pixels tall and 2100 pixels wide. The minimum size (in pixels) to get a decent print of the image would be 750 pixels tall and 1050 pixels wide. This would yield a printed image that's 5 X 7 inches at 150 ppi.

You can use an image editing program to adjust image resolution. The trick is to avoid "resizing" an image by "throwing away" pixels. This reduces the resolution and thus the quality of the image.

Keep in mind, many images posted online are set to 72 ppi or 96 ppi which is "screen resolution." This is much too low-res for printing. To print such images, you'll need to adjust the resolution to somewhere between 150 ppi and 300 ppi. It's important to keep the overall pixel count the same while changing only the pixels-per-inch parameter. An example:

An image on screen is 1500 X 2100 pixels but the resolution is set to 72 ppi. This means the image appears on screen to be about 21 X 29 inches in size when viewed at 100%. In order to print the image, change the resolution to 300 ppi. This will change the printed dimensions of the image to 5 X 7 inches but without losing any data (and thus resolution).

Click to expand...

Hope that helps!