In the past, you might have cut photos printed at home and stuck them together to make a huge collage. Now, you have many options for displaying your photos creatively. But what should you keep in mind when you do that?

Be it of sunset, mountain scenery, architecture or a portrait, the effect that the poster gives depends on the colors, detail and sharpness. Some imaging services go by the motto "more of everything" and turn up the saturation during automatic correction. What looks striking at first soon starts looking very unnatural. A poster should show colors as close to normal as possible, that is, neutral with a pleasant contrast and without color casts. These look particularly unpleasant on skin tones. Even a light blue cast can make the person in the picture look pale, and if portraits have too much red the faces look sunburnt.

Color casts can even distort typical landscape pictures and make them look unnatural. A yellow or purple tinged sky looks strange, and it gets even worse if the shift is completely opposite to that of the attual colors. Imagine a light red tinge to a turquoise sea or a blue tinge to an orange sunset. In our view, to get the best out of your photo printer, try using high-quality, high-GSM photo paper.

Also, think about how you want to present or hang the photos before starting off. There are alternatives to traditional framing, which also happens to be quite expensive. If you think framing is annoying, you can mount pictures on an acrylic-on-paper board or a rigid foam board. This minimalist approach looks like a canvas stretched across a frame and still maintains its charm. Many image printing services can laminate photos together while developing them.

Another elegant and discreet option would be aluminum tracks pulled across the top and bottom e'dge of the picture, which put the poster right against the wall. For a more casual look you can use magnetic strips which also gives you the freedom to compose a gallery of pictures using flat magnets. The advantage here is that you can change the pictures whenever you like.