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Resolution question
I generally render my pictures at about 4000 – 5000 px at a resolution of 72 DPI. After a substantial amount of post work on a particular piece the buyer wants the picture at 300 DPI. I normally know in advance what resolution the piece will be at at and can plan accordingly. I haven’t run into this before. Is it as simple as Pshoping the resolution up to 300? A few test pieces I did made the picture quite large…over 10k…is this right?
I did another test piece at a bit over 4000px at 72DPI…put in PShop changed the res to 300 which made a massive picture. I then changed the pic dimensions back down to the original size just over 4000 and res was 300. Does anyone know if this ok to do? Or will my client have some screwy issues with printing?
Thanks for any advise don’t know who else to ask! Cinema is easy to set this stuff pre-render but changing things after has proven vexing.
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5 Replies
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DPI and pixel resolution are independent. DPI and print resolution are related.
A 3000px wide image at 300 DPI would print to 10 inches wide.
If your client is only asking for 300 DPI (and not for a 16000 pixel wide image) then the solution in Photoshop should be relatively simple:
1) Open image
2) Activate the menu item Image > Image Size… (ctrl-alt-i on PC, cmd-opt-i on Mac)
3) Disable the “Resample Image:” checkbox at the bottom of the Image Size dialog
4) Enter “300” in the “Resolution:” field and make sure it’s set to “Pixels/Inch”
5) Hit Enter to accept and you’re done.
If you want to be generous you could ask your client how large they want the printed image to be and adjust your pixel resolution to match.
Darby Edelen
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Thank you Darby, I think I would have been alright not asking. But when reputation is on the line its best to get expert advise; better safe than sorry!
Thanks again…
J
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Hi Jason,
I’ve read about your problem then I’ve checked one of my previous work which was an A4 size rendered image for printing. I was surprised because when I opened the picture (rendered with Cinema) in Photoshop, the picture resolution was 72 pixels/inch but I saved it with 240 pixels/inch (from Picture Viewer in Cinema). After that I realized that is not a problem.If you would like to render images for printing you should set the resolution in Cinema to 300 pixels/inch (at least 240, but it depends on the client’s demand).
In Photoshop, you need to turn of (tick out the checkbox) the ‘Resample Image’ in Image size dialog and add the right value in the Resolution field. Now your image has the right size with the right resolution. You have to do this before the postproduction.In my case, the rendered image size is 31.8 MB, 2807×1985 pixels, 240 pixels/inch and ~ 21×30 cm (but it’s not in a compressed format, it’s a TIFF file).
In photoshop you could see the physical size of your picture in the Image size dialog, under Document size.
When you entered the 300 instead of 72 your document size rest the same. Then you resized your image when you entered a lower dimension but it become much smaller.Instead of render this image again with the higher resolution setting, open your file with Photoshop, Turn off ‘Resample Image’and add a lower value in the document size field. The resolution will be bigger. Change the document size according to the required resolution. If your picture is 4000 pix wide it will be around 40 cm with ~240 pixels/inch. It’s quite a big picture.
I hope this will help you.
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Thank you for your post good sir, it is much appreciated as with everyone who takes time to help! Have a good week!
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I’ve just seen Darby’s previous post. In brief that was also a good solution.
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