Pixelated Printing.

[noah_bolanowski]

<p>I recently had some of the photo's in my school newspaper were exptremmly pixelated (pictures were extremmly square-like), as of next year im becoming the head of photography and was hoping someone could help me identify what could be causing this, how to prevent it, and basically everything about it. </p>

<p>Thanks!</p>

[JDMvW]

<p>Probably the biggest cause is printing small pictures so large that the pixels show.</p>

<p>Naive shooters will sometimes crop down to a size by inches to low resolution or otherwise end up with the picture at 72 ppi or 90ppi (screen 'standard') instead of working with pixel size and changing the image to a finer 'pitch' (say 180ppi or 300ppi).</p>

[Matt Laur]

<p>Or, people use various "helpful" pieces of software to prep images to email to each other, or they post them online on social media ... all sorts of processes/venues that greatly reduce the resolution of the image so that it's well suited to display on a computer screen. But that's not nearly enough pixels to support quality printing. So you need the original resolution files to work with - not just something that someone has posted on Facebook, and then passed along.</p>

[noah_bolanowski]

<p>is there any way to test how the image would look on lets say an 8x10 inch paper before printing?</p>

[robert lee]

<p>Sure. Work the file until it's ready for full size output. Crop out a section small enough to fit 8x10. Print the crop.</p>