How do you get your photos printed out usually? especially if they are larger ones say 30 x 45 for example.
On the computer or in a lab? if you're making something big I would go to the lab to have it printed just so it will come out the best quality possible. Plus their printers are all color correct usually to print out exactly what the photo is.
I did this the other day and it came out all pixelized (if thats even a word) but it didnt really look good at all. I was very disapointed and thought maybe it was something i did wrong.
So you gave your picture to a lab to print? Did you give them the negative or a digital copy of the picture? Pixelization is the result of using to small of a digital images file and trying to make it too big (i.e. 30x45)
yes, if the picture has too small of a dpi then it will look very bad. You need to make the image in Photoshop the size you want to print it at. I usually work my prints at 600 dpi. Although, I would go with whatever your computer can handle.
If you don't have a large enough resolution to begin with then your probably never going to be happy with the print. What MP is the photo?
A normal human eye can't see pixels if there are more than 250+ on an inch. So If would print a 6Mp image (3000x2000 pixels), you can get a max print of ( 3000 / 250 = ) 12 by ( 2000 / 250 = ) 8 inches. BUT, thats not all photoshop can calculate aditional pixels for you. pixels that have never actualy been captured when you took the picture. It calculates it based on the colour of the surounding pixels to make the resolution of the pic a bit higher, so you can print it a little bigger. In photoshop, go to resize (or whatever its called, I only have paintshop, works a little different there) Now, set the resampling methot to bicubic, set the resolution to 250 dpi. Now you can adjust the hight or with of the image. I'll use the 6Mp image as an example again. You can now set the 8 in the normal 12 to 8 size to, say, 10. the 12 of the old size will automaticly change to 15 inch. So you can now print up to 10 by 15 inch. But beware. If you ad extra pixels, created by photoshop, to your image, it will loose some to all of its sharpness at some point. so keep a close eye on your imange when doing this! Some (most) printers, especialy the ones at the photo lab, can print with waay higher dpi. and the higher the dpi, the better the image quality. so you can go way higher than 250 dpi, but not lower, cause you'll be able to see the pixels than.
