Saturday, May 12, 2012

Useful Article on Printing Resolution at digitalphotopro.com

 
Table Source: http://www.digitalphotopro.com/technique/workflow/the-right-resolution.html

How do you decide what print resolution to use when printing your digital files? Do you always just set it to 300 dpi and forget it? Just use the native resolution of the image? I have known that you can get by with lower resolution printing for larger images, but didn't really know how to calibrate that. I have also learned the trick of increasing resolution to 360 dpi when I make large prints of smaller resolution images.

(Click Here) to read the whole article, which leads me to somewhat different conclusions.

First off, the table above. This table reinforces the idea that you can get by with lower print resolutions for larger prints. For example, a 3.5" x 5" print is normally viewed from 10-12" distance, meaning about 300 dpi is correct.

However, this article finds that there is benefit in printing to 360 dpi resolution with Epson printers (mine is Epson), 300 dpi for Canon, regardless of final print size. So, conclusion 1 is that you should print at 360 dpi for any print size, even if your file isn't that high in resolution. The article explains how to do this from Lightroom.

The second conclusion is that if your original file is even higher resolution than the Epson native resolution of 360 dpi at the size you want to print, you should NOT decrease the resolution. In fact, you may benefit from increasing the resolution to 720 dpi, if you have an Epson Pro printer, which has a maximum detail resolution of 720 dpi.

This article goes far in demonstrating the differences, yet results in simple conclusions. Very helpful.

DMC-365.blogspot.com


 
 

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