Prevent printing regrets because ink is expensive! Use hi-res photos for sharp prints and to prevent jagged lines. Hint: Make sure your phone-camera is taking a high enough resolution to look good when printed. Is my image hi- or lo-res? Heavy file size can be a clue, but not in all cases.
The best way is to open up the picture in an image program and view the file properties. Resolution also helps you figure out how much you can enlarge a photo. Rule of thumb: divide the pixel size dimension of the image by the resolution at least ppi to get the maximum print size in inches. So, if your image is 2, pixels in length at ppi, then you can print it up to six inches or so 2, divided by Hi-res files are a great thing. You and I might call this You can check the width and height of an image using your photo editing software.
The image above shows the resulting information dialog box. A pixel can only be one color, and a photograph is made up of a grid of thousands of pixels, each of the different colors that together make up your image.
You can see these pixels if you open a photo and zoom in until you see single blocks of color as shown below. Each of these blocks is a pixel:. This literally refers to the number of pixels in an inch-long line of an image. Most printing services, and indeed your own printer , will require a certain density of pixels in the image PPI to be able to render a print that looks good i. So for example, if you want to print a 4 x 6 inch image at PPI, then you need a file that has at least 4 x pixels along its short side and 6 x pixels on the long side.
In other words, it needs to be at least x pixels in size. Of course, most people don't print their photos at weird sizes like 4 x 2. An excellent question, and the answer comes to us once again through some boring yet simple math. Let's say you've taken some photos of your recent family vacation using your digital camera and you want to print out some 4 x 6's on your printer. Let's look at both of these resolution values though to see how large of an image, in pixels, we'll need out of the camera in order to print 4 x 6's with good image quality.
First, let's look at pixels per inch:. To figure out how large, in pixels, our images need to be in order to print 4 x 6's at professional quality, all we need to do is multiply x 4 for the width, and then x 6 for the height or vice versa depending on if your photo is in landscape or portrait mode. We can see exactly how many pixels that is by multiplying by , which gives us 1,, pixels.
Let's round that up to 1. That may sound like a lot of pixels but it really isn't, not when you consider that 1. We'll use the same simple formula as above, where we'll multiply by 4 and then by 6 to give us the pixel dimensions we'll need:.
What if you have a photo you absolutely love and feel it deserves an 8 x 10 print rather than a 4 x 6? How large of an image in pixels do we need to print a good quality 8 x 10? The answer is as easy as when we needed to find out how large of an image we'd need for a 4 x 6. All we need to do is multiply the resolution value in pixels by the width in inches and do the same thing for the height.
Let's first use pixels per inch as our resolution:. From our little bit of math, we can see that in order to print a photo at good quality as an 8 x 10, our photo needs to be pixels wide by pixels high or vice versa , for a total of approximately 4.
Now we're starting to push the limits of lower end digital cameras. It would fall about , pixels short. You could still print an 8 x 10 image of course, but you most likely wouldn't get professional looking results. Now we're really pushing the limits as far as digital cameras currently on the market.
Now that's a lot of pixels! This means you need at least a 7. Of course, keep in mind that most photos require at least a little cropping, which means you'll need to start with even more pixels. If you know you're going to be printing a lot of photos as 8 x 10's, investing in a good quality 8 MP or higher camera is highly recommended.
And there we have it! Get all of our Photoshop tutorials as PDFs! Download them today! The Document Size sections tells us how large or small the photo will print based on a specific resolution.
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