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Question on resizing for printing

 I am just wondering what is a recommended file size that would give you the best quality larger prints eg. 11 x 14 when you develope and resize raw files to jpeg for printing.  Is there a cheat sheet or can we put one together.  Just trying to understand the resizing file size vs quality.

Also is there a place or does anyone have a cheat sheet for DOF settings that they could share.  Thanks for any input.

Author: Monika Paterson | September 17th, 2009 | Category: How To

1 comment to Question on resizing for printing

  • Derek Carlin
    October 18th, 2009 at 3:55 pm

    like most answers to these kinds of questions … “it depends”. My guideline is first to know what device you are outputting on. What is resolution of the printer? If it’s an inkjet at home, then those usually have a higher density. But most prints will look decent at around 480 dots per inch (dpi) on inkjets. For laser printers, 600dpi is often decent. But if you’re using a dye-sublimation printer (like those like dedicated 4×6 printers that are popular now), or a photo lab that uses dye-sub printers, then those are actually fairly low resolution — about 120 to 180dpi, but the dye dots flow together so you don’t see the dots/jaggies as much.

    Once you know a resolution you’re printing at, then assume you want at least enough pixels to match those needed dots (you know dpi, so multiply it out for what you need — I’m not a photoshop expert, but I believe you have a sizing step where you take your image and tell it what size document/page it’s going to be on). If the print is at higher resolution than your actual image, the software will do some interpolation, so often it will still look pretty good. (I’ve had 8m-pixel images blown up to 50″ posters, and they still look decent). A 4 megapixel image will usually look good up about 8×10″; my 8m images go up to 16×20 and look decently sharp.

    the purists will also argue you have to take into account how close the viewer will be to the image when viewing it, and then you have yet another factor into required DPI (the closer your nose is to the image, the higher the resolution you want. The 50″ poster I mentioned before looked great, but was meant to be viewed from about 4-8 feet away — if you put your nose against the paper, you could see the printer dots).

    hope that helps.

    what kind of cheat sheet for DOF are you looking for? ranges of in-focus distances based on various factors? google about, there’s a few sites around that will, given the lens and specs about you frame size, etc. will give you such a chart — some of the more technical members might even know a couple of sites by heart. There’s a lot of math behind those. I usually use the auto DOF on the camera where you set the near/far points and let it work out the aperture in those cases.