I have often received images from clients for use in a print job that is unusable because of its print resolution. When I ask for an alternate image that is a higher resolution, I usually receive a replacement that is likewise unusable. Because of situations like this, I decided what better way to reduce these exchanges than to help to educate folks that hire creatives in some design basics that should help their projects move more smoothly and quickly.

Dots?

When designers and other creatives speak of resolution in relation to photographs, they are most commonly referring to Dots Per Inch or DPI. Essentially every picture is made up of several dots of colour distributed in the image’s dimensions ultimately creating the image you see either on your monitor or in a printed photograph.

The dots can be black, white, or colour. Essentially, the more dots there are in an image the clearer the picture is. More dots means more information and as such the file’s size will be much larger. The number of these dots across a vertical or horizontal inch determines what the DPI is.

Printing and Viewing

Now that you know what DPI is it should be made clear that when it comes to output, every device has a maximum DPI that it can display. For example a printer that advertises as being able to print at 600 DPI can print images up to that resolution. However, when printing any image that has a higher resolution than 600 DPI, the printer will essentially disregard dots in excess of that 600 dot limit. Monitors and cellular phones can generally only display at 72 DPI (some 96), and the general standard for professional printing is 300 DPI.

When an image is used that has a higher resolution than the device can output, all those extra dots are not displayed and therefore wasted. The problem with doing this especially in web projects is that those extra dots increase file size and therefore increase the time spent loading the image in the first place. In print projects images that have resolutions that are too high, this balloons the overall project’s file size and complicate the transferring of the final file to the printers.

How do I know when my resolution is too low?

When you try to print for example a 72 DPI image from the Web on a printer, the image when printed will not look anywhere near as good as it does on your screen. It may generally appear blurry or pixelated as the printer does not have enough information (dots per inch) to recreate the image in a clear way.

I hope this has been helpful!

All royalty free images from www.sxc.hu

It’s been an incredibly busy year for me. At  work I’ve been put on 234,876 committees while juggling my responsibilities as a lecturer and an advisor. It’s been a pretty busy year for the design side of things as well.

Some of the highlights included finishing the Ballast & Capel and Women’s Empowerment Summit websites and quite a bit of work on the Women’s Empowerment Summits in the Bahamas and the BVI in 2011 including the programmes and most of the advertising. I also worked with LIME and their BVI Talent Search competition.

Later in the year I had the opportunity to shoot USVI First Lady Cecile deJongh with Anya Schultheiss – a real local talent.

As 2011 draws to a close, the new year doesn’t look to be coming with any reduction in activity and in many ways that is a blessing. See you guys on the other side of January 1.