ixels as Legos®. with 300 different color blocks per square foot, you could make a pretty decent image. Try it with 72 Legos per square foot and well, you get the idea. Why 300 ppi? It has to do with something called “Line screen.” Look closely at a printed page. Use a magnifying glass. See all the dots? that’s the line screen—DPI—dots per inch. There are usually 150 of them fit into one square inch if you want to count them. Those dots, mixed together by your eye, produce the image in your brain. When commercial printers processes or convert your picture to be printed, they need double the resolution than they will print at. I don’t know why this is, butThese days much of a graphic designer’s work, and many others who work with photographic images, is intended to be published on the internet. These folks are quite familiar with the specifications needed to accomplish this. These pictures which are often generated by digital cameras are almost always “web-ready.” In order to be acceptable for a web site, an image needs to be RGB, and 72 ppi (or sometimes called dpi). The first refers to how color is handled by a computer screen. It stands for Red, Green, Blue. With these three colors, your computer (and TV) is able to display all the colors you could possibly need. To see this in action, try this cool experiment:

Get three flashlights (same size if you can) and attach three pieces of colored film, cellophane or plastic, one to each flashlight. In a darkened room, shine each light on a white surface and overlap the circles. Where they all overlap you’ll see white! Cool huh? That’s how RGB works. DPI or PPI stands for “Dots Per Inch” (used for printers) and “Pixels Per Inch” which is used in the digital world.

Therefore an acceptable screen photo is usually 72 ppi and RGB. Many web generator programs will often adjust your photos automatically with little effort on your part.

But what about printing? I don’t mean the little inkjet gizmo next to you in your office. You can get a decent image from those no matter what you use. I’m talking about Commercial offset printers—the place you go to print 10,000 catalogs, magazines, sales sheets etc. For these you need to supply “High Resolution Images,” and here things get a little tricky.

The first thing you need to keep in mind is, your picture must be shot originally as a high-res image. You can’t just take a low-res (72ppi) shot and simply enlarge it to a high-res (300 ppi) image. The reason is that a low-res picture doesn’t have enough digital information in it. Have you ever seen an advertisement or picture in a brochure that has a bad case of the “jaggies?” That’s what happens when someone takes an image that is 2”x 3” @ 72 ppi and simply enlarges it to 6” x 9.” The result is a photo that’s 6” x 9” @ 24ppi, and it prints with jagged edges and looks lousy. Or, someone takes the same image, enlarges it and then forces it, in photoshop, to have 300ppi. When printed, this image looks washed out, blurry, and again, lousy.

If you need to print with a commercial printer, you need to shoot your photos physically larger (8”x10” in this case) with at least a 300 ppi setting. You can make it smaller (6” x 9”), and then reset the ppi to 300 without doing any damage to the image.

Think of pixels as Legos®. with 300 different color blocks per square foot, you could make a pretty decent image. Try it with 72 Legos per square foot and well, you get the idea. Why 300 ppi? It has to do with something called “Line screen.” Look closely at a printed page. Use a magnifying glass. See all the dots? that’s the line screen—DPI—dots per inch. There are usually 150 of them fit into one square inch if you want to count them. Those dots, mixed together by your eye, produce the image in your brain. When commercial printers processes or convert your picture to be printed, they need double the resolution than they will print at. I don’t know why this is, but

riment:

Get three flashlights (same size if you can) and attach three pieces of colored film, cellophane or plastic, one to each flashlight. In a darkened room, shine each light on a white surface and overlap the circles. Where they all overlap you’ll see white! Cool huh? That’s how RGB works. DPI or PPI stands for “Dots Per Inch” (used for printers) and “Pixels Per Inch” which is used in the digital world.

Therefore an acceptable screen photo is usually 72 ppi and RGB. Many web generator programs will often adjust your photos automatically with little effort on your part.

But what about printing? I don’t mean the little inkjet gizmo next to you in your office. You can get a decent image from those no matter what you use. I’m talking about Commercial offset printers—the place you go to print 10,000 catalogs, magazines, sales sheets etc. For these you need to supply “High Resolution Images,” and here things get a little tricky.

The first thing you need to keep in mind is, your picture must be shot originally as a high-res image. You can’t just take a low-res (72ppi) shot and simply enlarge it to a high-res (300 ppi) image. The reason is that a low-res picture doesn’t have enough digital information in it. Have you ever seen an advertisement or picture in a brochure that has a bad case of the “jaggies?” That’s what happens when someone takes an image that is 2”x 3” @ 72 ppi and simply enlarges it to 6” x 9.” The result is a photo that’s 6” x 9” @ 24ppi, and it prints with jagged edges and looks lousy. Or, someone takes the same image, enlarges it and then forces it, in photoshop, to have 300ppi. When printed, this image looks washed out, blurry, and again, lousy.

If you need to print with a commercial printer, you need to shoot your photos physically larger (8”x10” in this case) with at least a 300 ppi setting. You can make it smaller (6” x 9”), and then reset the ppi to 300 without doing any damage to the image.

Think of pixels as Legos®. with 300 different color blocks per square foot, you could make a pretty decent image. Try it with 72 Legos per square foot and well, you get the idea. Why 300 ppi? It has to do with something called “Line screen.” Look closely at a printed page. Use a magnifying glass. See all the dots? that’s the line screen—DPI—dots per inch. There are usually 150 of them fit into one square inch if you want to count them. Those dots, mixed together by your eye, produce the image in your brain. When commercial printers processes or convert your picture to be printed, they need double the resolution than they will print at. I don’t know why this is, but

t to you in your office. You can get a decent image from those no matter what you use. I’m talking about Commercial offset printers—the place you go to print 10,000 catalogs, magazines, sales sheets etc. For these you need to supply “High Resolution Images,” and here things get a little tricky.

The first thing you need to keep in mind is, your picture must be shot originally as a high-res image. You can’t just take a low-res (72ppi) shot and simply enlarge it to a high-res (300 ppi) image. The reason is that a low-res picture doesn’t have enough digital information in it. Have you ever seen an advertisement or picture in a brochure that has a bad case of the “jaggies?” That’s what happens when someone takes an image that is 2”x 3” @ 72 ppi and simply enlarges it to 6” x 9.” The result is a photo that’s 6” x 9” @ 24ppi, and it prints with jagged edges and looks lousy. Or, someone takes the same image, enlarges it and then forces it, in photoshop, to have 300ppi. When printed, this image looks washed out, blurry, and again, lousy.

If you need to print with a commercial printer, you need to shoot your photos physically larger (8”x10” in this case) with at least a 300 ppi setting. You can make it smaller (6” x 9”), and then reset the ppi to 300 without doing any damage to the image.

Think of pixels as Legos®. with 300 different color blocks per square foot, you could make a pretty decent image. Try it with 72 Legos per square foot and well, you get the idea. Why 300 ppi? It has to do with something called “Line screen.” Look closely at a printed page. Use a magnifying glass. See all the dots? that’s the line screen—DPI—dots per inch. There are usually 150 of them fit into one square inch if you want to count them. Those dots, mixed together by your eye, produce the image in your brain. When commercial printers processes or convert your picture to be printed, they need double the resolution than they will print at. I don’t know why this is, but

e of the “jaggies?” That’s what happens when someone takes an image that is 2”x 3” @ 72 ppi and simply enlarges it to 6” x 9.” The result is a photo that’s 6” x 9” @ 24ppi, and it prints with jagged edges and looks lousy. Or, someone takes the same image, enlarges it and then forces it, in photoshop, to have 300ppi. When printed, this image looks washed out, blurry, and again, lousy.

If you need to print with a commercial printer, you need to shoot your photos physically larger (8”x10” in this case) with at least a 300 ppi setting. You can make it smaller (6” x 9”), and then reset the ppi to 300 without doing any damage to the image.

Think of pixels as Legos®. with 300 different color blocks per square foot, you could make a pretty decent image. Try it with 72 Legos per square foot and well, you get the idea. Why 300 ppi? It has to do with something called “Line screen.” Look closely at a printed page. Use a magnifying glass. See all the dots? that’s the line screen—DPI—dots per inch. There are usually 150 of them fit into one square inch if you want to count them. Those dots, mixed together by your eye, produce the image in your brain. When commercial printers processes or convert your picture to be printed, they need double the resolution than they will print at. I don’t know why this is, but

ixels as Legos®. with 300 different color blocks per square foot, you could make a pretty decent image. Try it with 72 Legos per square foot and well, you get the idea. Why 300 ppi? It has to do with something called “Line screen.” Look closely at a printed page. Use a magnifying glass. See all the dots? that’s the line screen—DPI—dots per inch. There are usually 150 of them fit into one square inch if you want to count them. Those dots, mixed together by your eye, produce the image in your brain. When commercial printers processes or convert your picture to be printed, they need double the resolution than they will print at. I don’t know why this is, but it has to do with how they “RIP” the image ( Raster Image Processing ). Just send files that are the same size (or larger) in inches that you want it to print, at 300 ppi, and you’ll be fine. The other thing you need to do is convert your picture from RGB, to CMYK. That stands for the four inks that printers use— hence the term “4-color printing.” Duh? Switching the mode of your photo from one to the other does no damage to it. And incidentally, if you forget to change some of your photos to CMYK, don’t worry, the printer will catch the ones that fall through the cracks. They won’t be happy about it but hey, mistakes happen. Getting the resolution right is far more critical—that can’t be fixed. Happy Printing!