Print resizing

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Gary
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Following on from my previous thread about the acrylic block.

I also had some photos printed for myself I wanted a couple sized to be 16x12. I would normally get my prints done at 9x6.


At first I used to size my photo's to 9x6 then changed somewhere along the line. My reason being that the camera ratio is 3x2 so if I just uploaded the file it would print without cropping.


This seems to work fine.


I am a member of a camera club but never enter prints in competitions.


That said one of the lads at the club sent me a link to this video explaining how to prepare a file for printing.


I watched this and prepared one of the photos I just got printed. The image was 16x12 and printed well and I am happy with it. I also had the same image printed by just uploading the file without me resizing " daft really" as I had that one done at 12x8 and in glossy rather than lustre all for comparison.


I can see from the results that the quality looks the same other than I think the lustre is a better finish but that might be to do with the type of photo. I have no idea whether one genre is suited to a certain type of paper or another.


So after all that waffle my question is it worth the effort to resize the image as in the video as opposed to just sending the file at the native size.



If you have 10 mins to spare I have linked to the video.


Gaz

https://christinewiddall.co.uk/tutorials/preparing-files-for-commercial-printing/
 
The video is pretty useful. Esp the parts about making the image size the same as the paper print size (by adding a border) and paper profiling. It also explains how to resize your images well.

It doesn't really explain when you'd need to resize though. Print companies often ask for "300ppi" because they don't want angry customers complaining about pixelated images, but in real life, 300ppi is probably more than most people need.

And when I say most people, the one group I don't include in that is "some camera club judges". In My Experience, these judges like to get their nose up against the print to determine sharpness because they believe that sharpness is all that matters. It's physically impossible to appreciate a 16x12 print from 4" away. Most people will look at a 16x12 from 2 or 3 feet away at best. And at that distance, their eyes can't resolve better than 115ppi (average human with 20/20 vision). At 6 feet, the eye can't do better than 50. And if they're old farts like me, it'll be even less.

So if you are hoping to enter prints for your club comp, and you see the judges get their noses up to prints, following the process in the video is probably advisable. My rule of thumb though is that anything over 100ppi is fine for any image. I think the A4 I did for you was about 120 and I couldn't see any pixelation - it looked fine. If you follow that rule, pretty much any digital camera made after 2008 will print fine to any size without resampling.
 
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@Harlequin565

Thanks Ian. I may have misled you with the camera club talk. I have no intension of doing prints for the comps. It was just for my myself.

I didnt really want to go through the trouble of following that video if I didnt have to. It is much easier to edit the image to my liking upload to the printers and then choose my desired print size.

Having said that from what you say it will be a good idea to bookmark that.

So when would you need to resize / resample ?

Gaz
 
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So when would you need to resize / resample ?

I don't print big enough to need to do it. A2 is about as big as I go and my images are meant to be viewed from an appropriate distance. I too don't enter camera club comps!

You'd probably need to resize/resample
...when you get a client demanding a certain pixel size (usually without knowing why and usually demanding it in dpi which is impossible for an electronic file)
...if you wanted to show off and talk about gigapixels.
...if you had an image from something that was poor quality (that Kodak Easyshare 2MP camera with 600x400 resolution!)
...if you had poor quality film scans in similar resolutions
...making huge crops into your images and then trying to print big. I can see wildlife togs getting a lot out of this.
 
I don't print big enough to need to do it.

From your comments I would never need to do it either.

Thanks for clearing that up,

I do enter the jpeg section at the club or DPI section as they call it :)


Many thanks for the time taken to help me out on this subject.

Gaz
 
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