Print at what dpi?Help please

[kbialick]

Normally I export my photos I want to send out to print (nations photo lab) as tiffs but I never played with the resolution that's always set at 240... Is the the dpi for printing and if so what should I be setting it at or where to find it . Thank you in advance hope this is the right section

 

[The_Traveler]

Size, sharpen and export the images at the size in inches * (250 to 300) and high quality. This will give you adequate resolution.
Ignore the DPI in the image specifications, it has no bearing or effect.

 

[Big Mike]

Normally I export my photos I want to send out to print (nations photo lab) as tiffs but I never played with the resolution that's always set at 240... Is the the dpi for printing and if so what should I be setting it at or where to find it . Thank you in advance hope this is the right section

The number you are talking about is the PPI (pixels per inch), not the DPI (dots per inch).

The image setting, on it's own, is relatively meaningless. It just tell a computer how big to display the image on a screen. You can have an image that is 1200x1800 pixels and whether it's set to 100PPI or 600PPI, it 'should' print exactly the same.

But we also use the number as it refers to the print size we want. So for example, if you print that 1200x1800 image onto a 4x6 print size, the Pixels Per Inch (of paper) would be 300....but that still isn't really what the PPI setting is for. Unfortunately, some printers/labs will take the PPI, which is supposed to relate to screen size, and apply that directly to print size, which can be troublesome if you don't purposely set it to something high enough for a quality print.

So with that in mind, it's usually just easiest to tell people to set that number to something like 300.
But the most important thing is that you know the actual size of the image (in pixels) and how that relates to the size of print you can get (while maintaining photo quality).