Resolution for Professional Prints

I'm starting to universalize all my digital pictures and giving them

a standard resolution and dpi. What resolution and dpi do you

folks recommend for digital pictures that are to be printed and

sold?

3 to 4 pixels..

 

I guess maybe you mean something like 300 ppi/dpi? maybe if you have a particular lab ask them what resolution their printers like the most.

I guess I'd wonder why you might think that was a necessary step or maybe I'm not sure what the goal is. I'd think I'd leave the "resolution" at the max the camera offers or as cropped but not resize/resample unless I needed to for a specific purpose - like web viewing - save load time, bandwidth, etc. And (re)setting dpi would seem to me to be unnecessary as well, that would be revisited/optimized by the print drivers when print size was selected.

"What resolution and dpi do you folks recommend for digital pictures that are to be printed and sold?"

 

The plain truth is that it really doesnt matter. The smaller the print, the higher the resolution and vice versa.

 

While some would not dream of printing anything at less than 300PPI, others are selling prints from 2.1mp digital cameras.

I would save them at the normal rez and 48 bit tiff, then you can enlarge and do whatever you want later. Genrally with digital I think a 200 dpi lightjet looks pretty good. For a 3000x2000 file that would be 10x15.

 

For a 1ds mkII with a 4992 x 3328 file that would be roughly 16 x 24 at its native rez. A 200 dpi lightjet is about 4lp/mm in print.

<p>First, a definition: <i>"resolution" IS "dpi".</i> Resolution is how closely you can

discriminate between two things -- in other words, how close two pixels are together.

 

<p>I think the term you're shooting for is <i>dimensions,</i> which everyone (especially

marketing people, but not including graphics professionals) confuses with resolution.

 

<p>Bottom line is that resolution (or DPI) is irrelevant for your stored images. In effect,

digital images are "resolutionless" until they are output in some physical medium.

 

<p>But if you really mean "dimensions", I say that if you don't have a fixed purpose for an

image, save as many pixels as your camera gave you. If you *do* have a fixed purpose,

then that will determine the dimensions. For example, pictures for embedding in a web

page don't need to be more than a few hundred pixels across, email: 600 or so, snapshot

photos: 1800 or so, fine art photos: as many as you can get!

<i>"First, a definition: "resolution" IS "dpi".</i><p>Not quite. PPI (pixels per inch) would be more accurate. PPI and DPI (dots per inch) are not the same thing. Printers use DPI, and it takes a number of printed "dots" to make up a single pixel.

"Resolution" is a lot of things - what we don't know is what he expects/thinks it means. It may be the image size, like choosing between 3008x2000 and 2256x1496, etc.