Printing

rallyxe

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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)
 
digital image,
so if i made the image bigger in photoshop would it then come out better?
 
rallyxe said:
digital image,
so if i made the image bigger in photoshop would it then come out better?
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.
 
ohh okay thanks. What part of holland are you from?
 
there is not much to say about "what if it was 600dpi" if we dont know the size of your photo. exept that a 30 x 45 cm print would require an enourmous resolution..

30 cm being 12 inch and 45 being 18 inch, you would have needed a (12 x 600 = ) 7200 x 10800 image resolution make a print of 30 x 45 @ 600 dpi. (that equal to a 77MP camera) So I think the 600 dpi would be the dpi when printed at 10 x 15 cm.

Sorry if that all confused you, if so, just egnore it..

so If you you could tell us the size of you photo, I think we'll be able to help you better :)

(oh, I'm for Drenthe)
 
&Denekamp said:
A normal human eye can't see pixels if there are more than 250+ on an inch.

In fact, most labs have equipment that can output at 254 DPI maximum. Anyting over that is "extra" data.

Now remember... this applies to the final size of the print. So, if you give the lab a 15 mb file to make a 4x5 print, much of the data is discarded. When you make a 16x20 from the same file, somebody (you or the lab) has to increase the size of the file. Pro labs have programs that handle this quite well. I suspect the drugstore labs don't do this.
 
i have a photo i would like to print out 20 x 30, the photo is 1200dpi but when i view it it is very big on the pc, will it still print out fine?
 

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