Dots per inch & Pixels debate

[Walter Soyka]

[ted irving] “This is a great discussion. Glad I posted it.”

Absolutely!

[ted irving] “Seems that some of the confusion may begin with the Photoshop image size settings; scale, resize & constrain. If you adjust the dpi of any image the pixels or width & height will change accordingly. So you are really changing the dimensions when changing the dpi, although dpi has nothing to do with video but print.”

This is true when “Resample image” is checked on. If you uncheck “Resample Image” in Photoshop’s “Image Size” dialog box, then you can adjust an image’s DPI without actually changing its pixel dimensions.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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[Fred Miller]

dpi was the only thing I changed. I remember this specifically because it was a project in which someone else prepped the stills. They had followed my instructions as to minimum/maximum pixels, but ignored my instruction to set dpi to 72. It was probably about 3 or four years ago.

My first response was an attempt to address the ensuing discussion and the last sentence of the initial question, “So, should I ignore dpi settings in PHotoshop and just adjust the dimensions of the photo from lets say 1920 x 3000 to 720 x 480 or always adjust the dpi as well as the dimensions & set each image to RGB mode?”

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[John Doggett-williams]

Thanks for the great discussion. I’ve been told FCP doesn’t like stills over 4meg in size but to always use Tiff’s – but why not jpegs which are comparatively a much smaller meg size while retaining scale, is the quality difference that great?

John doggett-williams

[Matt Lyon]

Like Walter said, shimmering is a fact of life. You can only really judge on a broadcast monitor. Try throwing a “flicker filter” on your graphic and see if it helps. You also need to prep your graphics with an eye for what will work on screen. With lots of trial and error, you learn what is going to work.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto