Printing is a simple matter of hitting the Print button and sitting back to let your PC and printer do the rest, in theory. Sadly, in reality things are never quite that simple.

Today's inkjet printers are fantastically flexible and can produce great quality text and photo prints, but while your printer might produce pristine text output, the settings will need tweaking to the nth degree to work the same wonders on photographic prints.

Armed with the right information, however, you can wave goodbye to your printing woes. We'll talk you through the whole process and soon you'll be producing best-quality prints every time.

Quality control
Before you even think about going anywhere near your printer, you first need to consider the most important aspects of printing: the quality of the image you're printing and the size at which you should print it. In other words, you need to understand the dimensions of your picture.

Modern printers are capable of producing prints at far higher resolutions than your monitor can display, so a picture that looks big on screen could be smaller when printed.

As a general rule of thumb, a Jpeg photograph with a file size of at least 300KB is likely to be a suitable size for printing, though there are no hard and fast rules.

Size isn't everything, though, and the quality of the image is equally as important. If you have a grainy, badly coloured image then you can't expect the prints to be any better.

When selecting images for printing make sure that you pick the highest quality ones you have. You might want to use a photo-editing package to crop the image to the part you want to print, and perform corrections like red-eye removal or brightness and contrast balance.

Obviously, you should content yourself with the image's on-screen appearance before attempting to print, as this will save on ink, paper and time, but we'll come back to this point.

A perfect match
Printing an image so that its appearance on paper is identical to that on screen comes down to something called 'colour calibration'. In simple terms, it's necessary because monitors produce colours in a different way to printers. The former use light to make colours; the latter ink.

This means that colours displayed on a monitor have to be translated into an appropriate format before they can be printed.

It's the job of the printer driver to carry out this translation and how successfully it does this depends on its colour calibration. The process is further complicated by the type of image being printed and the best printer drivers judge each image on its individual merits so that, for example, photographs are treated differently to coloured documents.

Some printer drivers allow a degree of fine-tuning for the colour calibration process, others make it entirely automatic. Either method is usually sufficient for most people, as minor differences between displayed and printed colours are acceptable.

To delve any further into colour calibration, you need to be a serious digital photography enthusiast with deep pockets, as calibration kits cost around £350.

If you're willing to pay this price to ensure you're getting the best colour rendition possible, Colour Confidence provides various packages for the colour-conscious printer user.

Adding some colour
Depending on your printer, you might find that you have a choice of ink cartridges: three, five or even seven colours.

Three-colour cartridges are the most common and use cyan, magenta and yellow. When combined with the black cartridge, they produce a range of colours sufficient to meet the everyday printing needs of most people.

Five-colour cartridges include two additional hues of cyan and magenta, which enable the printer to produce a more complex array of colours, which in turn improves the look of skin tones and so forth.

In short, if you have the option to use a five-colour cartridge, you will find that the quality is a lot better than with the default three-colour option. HP has just raised the stakes with the introduction of an eight-colour printer, the Photosmart 7690.

To see the options that your printer supports read the product documentation or visit the relevant manufacturer's website.

Paper types
Slotting standard A4 copier paper into your printer and hoping for brilliant results will get you nowhere.

The majority of inkjet printers use dye-based ink for colour, which is absorbed easily by cheap paper, leading to colours bleeding into one another. This also dampens the paper, causing it to wrinkle, which is hardly going to give you beautiful prints.

As an aside, this problem isn't so bad when printing with black ink, as most black inks are now pigment based. Without going into the full technical detail, pigment-based inks aren't absorbed by paper in the same way, avoiding many of the problems associated with standard ink.

However, creating pigment-based colour inks is expensive, which is why most consumer printers rely on dye-based inks.

One remedy for this problem is to use specially treated paper, sometimes referred to simply as 'inkjet paper'. In your printer's manual you will find a list of recommended paper, usually the manufacturer's own-brand paper. For the best results, we suggest using the recommended stock.

There are two types of paper you need to know about: inkjet paper and photo paper. Inkjet paper is of a high enough grade to absorb ink without becoming too wet or allowing colours to bleed. However, it's only designed for printing text and the occasional picture.

For the best results you need to buy some glossy photo paper. Physically, this resembles a blank photograph and has the sheen you'd expect to find after having your photos developed at a film processing outlet. It makes a huge difference when printing and results are very impressive.

There are lots of different types of photo paper that range in quality. We suggest using the paper recommended by the printer manufacturer, going by the general rule that the more expensive the paper, the better the quality.

Preview your prints
Once you've covered all the bases mentioned and prepared everything, you're ready to start printing.

One of the most important tools for this process is the Print Preview function, which is available in most Windows applications under the File menu. It is useful because it shows you exactly what the print is going to look like on paper, ensuring that you do not waste costly paper unecessarily.