Pro printing, sizes

[Emma]

I want to print my layouts in a 4x6 brag book size. Just going to put them on my photo card and plug it in at Sam's Club

What do I need to do to prepare my layouts for the printner? I'm planning on cropping off the excess (they don't fit in the 4x6 frame, they'll be more like 4x5.5") and mounting them in a book. Do I have to shrink them down, or can I just load them full size and then specify what print size I want them.
Space on the card isn't an issue since I only want to print small groups. Can I print from psd files, or do they need to be jpg? If they're jpg, then I could just resize the file while I'm at it.
Can I preview each shot before it's printed, like on those cropping photo printers at some drug stores? To make sure everything is correct, or just plug the card in and see what I get?
If I can't preview, I'd like to prepare the best I can so I can be somewhat sure of the outcome.
Also, are there any settings/options on Sam's prints that I should choose for good lighting and color?

Thanks!

[Amanda]

I've never printed at Sam's, only Costco.

All of mine were .jpg 4x6 and then got a little chopped, but not too bad. There was no way to preview them beforehand.

[SuzanneCWalker]

From my very limited experience, and what I'm understanding about your question, I think you'll want to save the images the size you want to print... Can you burn a disc with the images as jpgs the size you want? If you can do that, you're golden - it's cheaper, too, because you hand it to the clerk and say, "I want one each of what's on here" or whatever, and then they print it ..............

Am I reading that right? I may be not understanding your question...

[DeeZee]

I just did this for my mother-in-law at Christmas. I guessing that your Sam's has the same machine as Walmart -- at least, the Sam's we visited in Orlando was the same as our Walmart.

You can preview your prints and have a very limited cropping/editing cability. You can only crop to their sizes with a preset box, so you won't be able to crop irregularly (I was going to leave white spaces on the sides and just crop that bit off and I wasn't able to do that).

My biggest problem was the photos that were taken vertically. Walmart's machine flipped them automatically to horizontal, even though I didn't want it to. I had cropped and resized to the sizes that I wanted, since I wanted all of my photos the same orientation in the brag book. I don't know WHAT walmart's machine did, but I ended up having to crop to small bits of face only in order to get the sizes I wanted since it turned them. I'm not sure what I wrote makes sense :-) For example, I had taken one vertical shot of my girls at White Sands -- I resized it so that the width of the picture was 4" (which was really the height since it was a vertical shot). I just was going to use it as a small picture. Walmart's machine stretched it to the full 4"x6" size and I couldn't figure out how to get around that.

I ended up having to leave a few photos out because I couldn't get them sized the way I needed.

[Angie]

Emma- I have made a lot of prints at Sams. You really don't need to crop all the photos to 4x6 if you don't want to. The machine will do it for you and you can review the crop before you print it. But since you are going to cut the print down to 4x5.5 just make sure you have plenty of space. The monitor I have worked on at our local Sams is usually calibrated very well so the colors are easy to adjust (prints match the monitor pretty good). Most of these machines will not recognize PSD file format so you will have to save in JPG file.

Hope they all turn out great!!

I want to print my layouts in a 4x6 brag book size. Just going to put them on my photo card and plug it in at Sam's Club

What do I need to do to prepare my layouts for the printner? I'm planning on cropping off the excess (they don't fit in the 4x6 frame, they'll be more like 4x5.5") and mounting them in a book. Do I have to shrink them down, or can I just load them full size and then specify what print size I want them.
Space on the card isn't an issue since I only want to print small groups. Can I print from psd files, or do they need to be jpg? If they're jpg, then I could just resize the file while I'm at it.
Can I preview each shot before it's printed, like on those cropping photo printers at some drug stores? To make sure everything is correct, or just plug the card in and see what I get?
If I can't preview, I'd like to prepare the best I can so I can be somewhat sure of the outcome.
Also, are there any settings/options on Sam's prints that I should choose for good lighting and color?

Thanks!