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
This doesn't make any sense. Why are you cropping your photo to reach 300ppi?
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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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 .
Exactly right ...
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.
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.
That 300 dpi is a bit of a legend and not really necessary.
- first read this https://www.claremon.co.uk/what-is-dpi-in-printing/
- Then you must understand that the necessary or optimum resolution is very much depending on the distance the beholder stands from the print. Any legal or A4 sized print will mostly be looked at from a distance of 50 cm or 18 inches. A door-sized print that covers a huge wall, say 6' by 4' or 180*120 cm will probably be looked at from a distance of 2m / 7' at least. So there is no need.
- Rule of thumb: If you halve the distance, you must square the number of pixels (double vertically and double horizontally = square)
- I have a number of prints in 90*60 cm (3 feet by 2) and a number of 120*80 cm (four feet by 2 1/2 or 48 by 32 inches) on my walls. They are printed in 160 and 128 dpi and they look perfectly sharp and not the least pixelated out of a 24 MP camera. The bigger ones hang on a wall behind/over a sofa/couch, so you can't really get closer than maybe 1,20m or 4' except if you climb and stand on that sofa.
- In short: the necessary resolution depends on the distance of the beholder as much as on the print size. The smaller the photo, the closer people get their noses ove the print and the finer the resolution should be.
Disclaimer: I know that 50 cm aren't 18" and 2m aren't 7' - but those numbers are close enough and we all can imagine them without a second thought, so I ... went for "the next best number"
The first question is what is the dimension of your original cropped image in pixels?