I have been wanting to do something with one of the walls in our living room for awhile. I found this post online about engineering prints and I loved the idea (link here). I had the kids get all dressed up, waiting until we had some good daylight flowing into our house and snapped some photos (using my wife’s Google Pixel 2, so not a super stellar, ultra-modern camera by any means), and popped open Snapseed to do some editing.
I am familiar with Snapseed (Free for Android and iOS), so I quickly edited the photos, but I wasn’t sure how they would turn out when being printed on a 24 x 36 poster. So here are the steps I took:
- Selected either the Bright or Faded Glow filter
- Went into Tools and selected:
- Black and White: Normal
- Portrait: Combo 3
- Curves: Adjusted it brighter
- Crop to adjust sizing (using 3:2 ratio)
- Adjust resolution. I shifted mine to 200 for the girls and about 300 for Enzo. You can’t do this in Snapseed. I did it on a Mac using Preview -> Tools -> Adjust Size and change the resolution
- Lastly, I went to View -> Actual Size on my Mac to see how pixelated it was going to look and went back to adjust my cropping or resolution to attempt to fix the pixelation.
Original 
Faded Glow 
Black and White: Normal 
Portrait: Combo 3 
Curves: Adjust brighter
I was not able to print the photos on Engineering prints as the original article did. I tried a couple different services but all said that they no longer will print photos as engineering prints. I ignored the warnings on the sites and attempted it anyways, only to receive a call that in order to get the print, I would have pay more or they would cancel the order. I elected to cancel the order. I ended up ordering 1 through Walmart for about $16 just to check the quality. The quality was fine so I printed the remaining.
While waiting, I knew I wanted to make some frames. I found these (Frames) and loved the simplicity. Shortly after finding those, my neighbor came over and said he happened to have a really old dining table that he bought awhile back that he no longer needed. It was made of solid pine and he knew I liked woodworking, so he just gave it to me. Enzo and I took the table apart, I cut it up and made the frames for the pictures.
