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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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communick@viewfinder.pro

Higher resolution is printing more pixelated (alien.top)

submitted 10 months ago by Various-Leadership68@alien.top to c/photography@viewfinder.pro

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So I don’t know a whole lot about printing, but I have read that you should export for printing at 300 ppi resolution. When I did this the photo I was exporting went haywire. It cropped my photo cutting a lot off, and it turned SO pixelated. When I took it back to the original 72 ppi it looks significantly better. This print is going to be 27in by 39in. Which at the 72 ppi it’s still pixelated enough that I don’t love it but it’s nowhere as bad as it was at the 300. What am I doing wrong? What’s a way to clear the pixelation on the print?

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[–] VivaLaDio@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

As usual most people here have no idea what DPI is.

DPI is a translator between digital space and physical space

If you have a picture of 500x500 pixels … how big is the picture in real life ? You don’t know. It can be 500 meters tall if you make 1 pixel 1 meter.

DPI (dots per inch) you can also say PPI (pixel per inch) is a value that you set if you want the highest quality print of your image if you don’t have a physical size limit. Example printing your stuff for an art show.

Now back to the initial image.

If you have a 500x500 pixel image and you set the DPI to 100 , now you have a 5x5 inch image printed.

If you have a fixed size you’re gonna print for example A4 , you don’t need to set the DPI.

What you did is basically tell the printer that you want your image to be printed much bigger than the actual space it was going to be printed, therefore it resulted in cropping .

[–] Dapper-Palpitation90@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

DPI (dots per inch) you can also say PPI (pixel per inch) is a value that you set if you want the highest quality print of your image if you don’t have a physical size limit. Example printing your stuff for an art show.

Nope!
You started out fine, but like so many other people, you're equating DPI and PPI, and calling them the same thing. DPI is purely physical, for printing, and PPI is purely digital, for viewing. There is ZERO overlap between the two.

[–] VivaLaDio@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago

There isn’t zero overlap , a pixel will be converted to a dot.

Making that statement makes it easier for people to grasp the concept, and does zero damage.

[–] Davie_Prod@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago

Exactly right ...