Why Website Photographs Are Not Good Enough For Printing

Friday, January 29th 2010

Website photographs are not generally high enough resolution to use in commercial printing. The reason for this is that computer monitors create their images by using different colours of light. This makes them very forgiving to low resolution images. What's more by using low resolution images less memory is used on each web page which speeds up it download time. A typical website photo is saved at 72 dots per square inch ( dpi ).

On the other hand printed images when produced on a press, use ink pigment which show up every imperfection that a a photo has. It is for this reason that they must be saved at least 300 dpi resolution. Whilst there are techniques that firms such as Modern Print can use to hide some of these imperfections and pixelization, there is only so much that they can do.

Furthermore, if your image is being enlarged it must be an even higher resolution. This is because when you enlarge something the number of dots making up the photo stay exactly the same, it is just that you have stretched them further apart which reduces the resolution.

So when you take a digital photograph to use on your printing make sure it is on the high resolution setting of your camera. It is very easy to reduce the resolution of you photos on a computer but almost impossible to add to it.

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