Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
no Official Board of Resolution Standards, this is the type of thing that gets ar-
gued endlessly in online discussion forums. That being said, I take the word of
This is one of those topics that tend to make people crazy, and since there is
for Printing
my friend and fellow photographer Dan Steinhardt from Epson (the man behind
the popular Epson Print Academy), who lives this stuff day in and day out (Dan
and I did an online training class on printing and this was just about the first topic
we covered, because for so many, this is a real stumbling block). Here's what we do:
Step One:
To see what your cur rent photo's resolu-
tion is, go under the Image menu and
choose
Image Size
(or press
Command-
Option-I [PC: Ctrl-Alt-I]
). Ideally, for print-
ing to a color inkjet printer, I like to be at
240 ppi (pixels per inch), but I often print
at 200 ppi, and will go as low as 180 ppi
(but 180 ppi is absolutely the lowest I'll go.
Anything below that and, depending on
the image, you'll start to visibly lose print
quality). So, I guess the good news here
is: you don't need as much resolution as
you might think (even for a printing press).
Here's an image taken with a 12-megpixel
camera and you can see that at 240 ppi,
I can print an image that is nearly 12x18".
Step Two:
Here's the resolution from a 6-megapixel
camera. At 240 ppi I can only print an
8x12.5" image. So, to make it larger, I turn
off the Resample Image checkbox, type
in 200 as my new resolution, and then I'd
have an image size of 10x15" (with no loss
of quality). If I lower it to 180 ppi (as low
as I would ever go), then I get the print
up to a finished size of 11x16.75" (nearly
that of a 12-megapixel camera), and I
did it all without losing quality (because
I turned off the Resample Image check-
box, but before you do this, you need
to read about resizing in Chapter 5).
