Family photo albums are great — for the two times a year you actually pull them off the bookshelf. Why not choose a couple of your favorite snapshots and give them their due? Digital photo technology makes it easy (and often inexpensive) to transform them into everything from a floor-to-ceiling mural of your beach vacation to colorized Warhol-esque portraits to supersize posters that will knock Monet’s lilies out of the water.

Starting Points

1. Choose only your best photos.

Don’t waste money on an out-of-focus shot, or one in which a subject’s eyes are closed. The less touching-up a lab has to do, the smaller the tab.

With a digital photo, you can eliminate problems like red-eye yourself before sending it off.

2. Submit a high-resolution image.

For safety’s sake, retain the negative and send a print to the lab. If the negative has been lost and you have only a single print, get it scanned at a copy store (about $10) at a minimum resolution of 300 dots per inch (dpi) — anything less and the photo will be fuzzy when enlarged. Have the image saved to a disk, then mail the disk (or download the image to your computer and e-mail it) to one of the labs recommended here.

Digital images can be downloaded from your camera and e-mailed at the highest resolution (at least 300 dpi).

3. Be absolutely clear.

When placing your order, make sure you’re specific about what you want — for example, the kind of paper, any retouching, or whether to retain a print’s white border (it will be proportionately larger when blown up) or bleed the image to the edges of the paper.

Ask the lab if it can e-mail a digital version of your order before printing it.