school me on dpi
- This topic has 12 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated Dec 7, 2007 at 5:02 pm by
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To date I’ve just been leaving everything at 72 dpi since I haven’t needed to print anything off. Just got a photo printer though and I’d like to make some 8×10’s and 4×6’s, mostly to give to family and stuff.
Seems like the most fool-proof way is just to set the dpi of the photos to the max dpi of the printer… Paperwork for my printer (a Canon) says the dpi is 9600 x 2400, on my software the dpi is just entered as one whole number and the 9600 x 2400 doesn’t seem to be a ratio of a standard 11 x 8.5 piece of printing paper either…
Basically I’ve got this same problem: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=100806
Anyone think they can give me a clearer or at least more Canon than Epson related answer?
Most inkjet printers work optimally at 240, 300, or 360 dpi. I would suggest in the future saving your images as hi-rez tiffs at 300 dpi or higher. You can always scale down copies to jpgs later.
Oh, and resize your images in Photoshop using Bicubic Smoother for enlargements. You can resize by inches/dpi or pixels/dpi.
Cool, thanks, I really value your opinions.
I might be PMing you later about the Bicubic Smoother if it’s not intuitive. I’ve got CS2 and have been resizing using the “resize image” (or something) option under “help” (I think). It’s got a “wizard” thing that pops up, asks you if it’s for printing or the web and you go from there… is that going to do it differently?
Edit:
ahhh… nevermind, just saw you said enlargements.Carter,
Go to Image>Image Size and choose your image dimensions in pixels/inches and dpi. At the bottom of the dialog box there are resampling options.
Bicubic (good, general resampler)
Bicubic smoother (specifically for up-rezzing or enlarging)
Bicubic sharper (specifcally for down-sizing images)Use the specific option for your needs to get the best results. You will be uprezzing if you are going to increase dpi to 300. Printing at 72 dpi will look terrible.
Dots Per Inch and Pixel Per Inch are the same, most printers work best at 300 dpi. If you think of your common print sizes 8X10 = 2400X3000 pixels, 4×6 =1600X2400 at 300 dpi etc. You can resize your images in many ways in PS. The first thing I would do is convert my camera files if they were at 72 dpi to 300 dpi with resampling turned off in the image size dialog. This will give you the size of you camera files at the printer resolution. Then you can up sample them as necessary. I re-sample in 10% increments till I get near the size I want then I use the crop tool set a specific size and crop the image exactly as I want. The aspect ratio of most image sensors dosen’t match most common print sizes perfectly and a lot of pictures need a little cropping.
If your picture is good and sharp you can upscale 200 to 300 percent or more depending on what you feel is acceptable.yeah, I haven’t been planning on trying to print anything at 72dpi, thats just been for messing around with on the computer.
I’ve been using Irident Digital’s RAW Developer for most stuff, so yeah, they’ve been at 72 to save space. Of course I can just open the original RAW file and make one at 300 pretty much instantly.
I don’t print stuff on inkjets, and i know from what i’ve heard there are certain resolutions that work best on them – so having said that, here is what i have learned over the last 10 years of using photoshop on resizing, which can be very confusing:
The whole idea of resolution can be a very grey and hard to understand area.
Check this out, there is a lot of info on this site. http://www.westcoastimaging.com/wci/page/info/photoshoptip/tip12.html
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