Image Resolution for Print I

This is a topic I touched on in a previous post (see JPEG vs TIFF). It seems like a topic that should be quite worn out by now, but somehow it never is. Here is the simple rule: Ideally, your image should be 300 dpi at the size at which it will be used.

I say, "ideally" because that is the ideal for premium quality commercial printing results. Obviously, we do not operate in an ideal world. Now, Messiah the Prince (Dan 9:25), having gone on a long journey to receive a kingdom (Luke 19:12), will return shortly and change that completely (Rev 19: 1-16). No, I mean more completely than that (2 Pet 3:10-13). This means that if you are not an ideal person, you have a problem, and you had better get with Him about it quickly while you have time (Psalm 2: 10-12).

In the meantime, though it may not be ideal, you can scale your image up as much as 250-300% or maybe more and still print a decent image. But be careful when you get up that high, and take a close look at your proof.

The key point is the "at the size at which it will be used." If your image is 300 dpi, but you are using just a small section that needs to be enlarged, then it is not 300 dpi at the size it will be used. The more the image is enlarged, the less the effective resolution will be. So you have to take the time to get in there and see what it is at size.

For example; many digital cameras record their image files in such a way that the image is listed as 72 dpi, but if you look you will notice that the file width is over twenty inches! I have no idea why, but the (relatively) high res file has been written so that the image resolution that is there is "spread out." If you gather it back down to somewhere around eight or nine inches in size it will be around 300 dpi.

But, if the image is four to eight inches in width and only 72 dpi, there is really not much you can do with that. Yes, you can take it into Photoshop and just scale the resolution up from 72 dpi to 300 dpi, but the only thing you will have accomplished is that your file will take up more room. Photoshop poorly handled can degrade the quality of your image, but even expertly handled Photoshop cannot just add quality into your shot that was never there to begin with (no matter what they show on the Network Crime Dramas). If you have a truly low res image it's going to look like a truly low res image, no matter how high you increase the resolution to. You don't want to go to print like that.

In the next entry I will cover more detail about the relationship of the resolution to the nominal image size, and what you can do with that in Photoshop.



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