I can’t have glass cases, shiny frames, or mirrors anywhere near where the sun touches the room. This also presents a problem for photographs that I want to hang in my home. Luckily I found a solution. Matte photo paper doesn’t glare like inkjet photo paper does. Matte paper has a dull coating on it that does not have the sheen, shimmer, and shine that regular photo paper has.

This is definitely a personal aesthetic but it’s a more pleasant look than all of that shine. When the sun hits a picture printed in regular photo paper it becomes such a reflective surface that it’s difficult to even make out what parts of the photo are!

Buy matte photo paper to print your photos on if you are hanging them in a room that gets a lot of light, even if it’s not direct sunlight.

Some of the recent trends in photo decorations revolve around using maps in interesting ways. As a lover of old maps and someone who loves geography, this trend is really exciting to me. That’s why I’ve come up with some great ideas for decorating your home with maps and photo paper.

My favorite idea so far is the silhouette frames. Silhouettes are also very trendy in home design at the moment. Here’s what you do. Find a great solid color that you like and goes with your current decoration scheme. This will be the matte you use for the background. You can use colored cardstock.

Then on your quality matte photo paper, print out a map of a city. For example, New York City. This can be any kind of map, I find that old street maps and interesting colors or patterns of streets work very well. After you print out the map, find a photo of a landmark in that city (i.e. the Statue of Liberty) and print it out in the size you want the silhouette to be to fit the frame. Cut out and trace the landmark onto the map. Cut out the map shape and mount it on the card stock background. Frame it up and you have a great piece of custom, homemade artwork!

Use inkjet photo paper to print out parts of the life you want to lead and create a personal growth collage. For example, if you see yourself as the head of a fortune five hundred company, you should print out photos of the office that you want, a secretary, the suits you want to wear, and other parts of the life that you want. Maybe you could even type up your own promotion letter to keep you motivated.

For those in artistic fields you can print out your works of art and those of people you admire in your field on great luster photo paper for the best quality. You can also print out photos of the theatre you want to perform in or the museum that you want your paintings to hang in.

It’s definitely a motivator when you have hard days to have a collage of things that you want looking at you from your cubicle or your living room wall!

Image Courtesy of Dallas Clayton

When I was in elementary school there were so many kids that we were separated into “Pods.” Each pod had a different grade in it and had several classrooms laid out in a circle with a huge bulletin board in the middle. At the beginning of each month, the school would provide a theme. April was rain. May was flowers. November was Thanksgiving. You get the idea. Each of the pods would proceed to decorate their bulletin board in that theme.

Some of the younger kids would just have cutouts of the same shape in matte paper and then they would color them and sign their names. The older kids would get huge reams of large format paper and have group coloring sessions in the center of the pod to create their masterpiece. Each grade would get a prize for their bulletin board. The awards would be for things like “most colorful” and “most use of frogs”, basically anything that would make that grade feel good about the work they had done.

I’m a big proponent of letting kids decorate their own schools. Their imaginations are so vast. Get some large format paper and let the kids go hog wild with their artwork!

One of the things that I did was to create my own coloring books. I could tailor the pictures and activities in the book to fit the needs and interests of the kid I was looking after. I would make space themed books for the little boy who wanted to be an astronaut and princess themed books for the two little girls I used to sit for. They loved them!

The process was really simple. All you have to do is do a quick internet search for free coloring pages. Find the images you want and print them out on matte photo paper. You can do the same thing with puzzles, crosswords, and mazes. After you find all the images and print them out, simply staple the pages together and you have your very own “new” coloring book that will entertain the kids for hours.

Just like a photographer, graphic designers need to print on the highest quality paper, professional photo paper. Image is everything, literally. The images can’t be printed on the cheap paper you used at home. The designs can look fantastic on screen and now it’s your job to translate that onto printed form. The colors need to pop and shine just as much as they do on your computer screen.

Photo Paper Plus has a vast selection of professional photo paper to choose from, such as inkjet fine art paper, glossy photo paper, and matte photo paper. With so many choices, the hardest part is deciding which paper will bring your designs to life best. With affordable prices, there is no reason your portfolio has to suffer.

First, don’t skimp on the dpi. The larger your dots per inch setting is, the clearer your printed photo will be. You’ll want your photos to be printed at 600 x 600 dpi at least! This will avoid the “frayed edge” look that some color prints can get.

Check your owners manual for your printer to see how to configure the printer settings. Be sure you tell the printer what kind of paper you’re printing on. This changes how the printer actually applies the ink to the paper. Choosing the wrong paper setting can cause you to have smudges or lines on your photo.

Lastly, make sure you have the latest printer drivers downloaded. The drivers are the software that allows the computer and the printer to “talk” to one another. The best communication between the printer and computer will lead to better quality photos on your wall.

If you’re looking for a fun gift for your kids, grandkids, or the neighborhood rugrats, why not try stickers? Making your own stickers is as easy as combining your favorite photo paper with adhesive vinyl sheets. Why stop at the stickers? Make a sticker book based on their lives. Print stickers of their favorite toys, their friends, and their family. Make a book about their day at school or featuring pictures of their room. This makes a great gift and possibly fantastic teaching tool.

If stickers aren’t the perfect gift for your family members, try personalized calendars. Every year we agonize over which calendar to buy for our homes, our desks, our offices. We can’t decide whether we’d like to look at corgis in tuxedos or ancient castles and ruins of Ireland all year long. Make the choice easier with a personalized calendar. Use pictures of family and friends and vacations you took together. These are sure to bring a smile to your face all year long.

There were lots of photos there too. I can remember my mother and father spending seemingly endless hours rifling through old photography books to find pictures of my grandparents. Then they would scan them, dad would retouch them using a computer software, and then they printed them on inkjet photo paper.

They arranged all of these restored and retouched old photos on poster boards around the hall where people could go and look at them. It was a great way for my grandparents to reminisce and for my relatives to tell stories about what was happening “behind the scenes.”

This party happened over ten years ago and the photos that were taken that day are now in my own photo albums and I’ll pull them out someday and go through the same process of restoring and printing them on photo quality paper to preserve them.

First, make sure you’re using a good quality of inkjet photo paper. This will insure the maximum quality of DPI (Dots Per Inch) on the paper. Use a high quality print setting as well. This will minimize the lines on the page as it prints.

Make sure that you’re printing on the correct side of the paper. At least one side should be coated, but sometimes both sides are able to take ink. Try to avoid touching the coating on the paper. Pick it up and handle it on the sides of the paper. This way the oil from your hands will not contaminate the coating on the paper.

You should also avoid stacking the printed pages until after they are thoroughly air dried.