Print designers these days have a problem we never used to have before the Internet came along: being given teeny little photos someone’s copied off their (or *gasp* someone else’s) website to be used in a document that will eventually be reproduced in print. I won’t go into the issue of copyright in this post, except to say: don’t copy stuff off other people’s sites without their permission!
What I do want to talk about… and boy, do I want to talk about it!… is the issue of screen resolution versus print resolution. Hey…I saw that yawn. Come on now, this is important.
If you don’t feel like reading a lot of technical stuff, here it is in a nutshell: You cannot copy images off a website and expect them to reproduce well in print. Do not ask your designer to go to your website for a copy of your logo or a photo to use in your flyer, your brochure, your catalogue or anything else that will be reproduced on anything besides a computer screen. The resolution is too low, the size is too small. It just ain’t gonna work, my friend.
Here’s why…
It’s simple math. To look good on screen, images only need to be 72 DPI. DPI stands for “dots per inch.” Also known as PPI, or pixels per inch. So, if you took a square inch of a photograph from a website, you’d have 72×72 dots/pixels (5,184 pixels on the screen). For a newspaper photo, you need 200 DPI, which equals 40,000 pixels in a square inch. For a magazine photo, you need 300 DPI, which is 90,000 pixels in a square inch.
If you take an image you copied from a website and try to use it on a print project, the image is going to look blurry or “pixelated.” Here’s what happens when you try to force a low-res photograph into a high-res print project:
This is my dearly departed cat, Bugsy Moran.
Now, imagine what would happen if you took that 1″ 72 DPI photo from your website and tried to run it at 300 DPI in your glossy brochure. It’s going to look blurry. And even worse, if you try to make it bigger than 1″ it’s going to look worse and worse the bigger you make it.
So, do yourself and your graphic designer a favour and keep an archive of all your photos in the highest resolution you can. When you take photos with your digital camera, unless you’re absolutely sure you’ll never need them for a print project, always use the highest resolution settings your camera can give you and do NOT edit the originals. Always keep a raw copy right off the camera that you never touch. That’s the one you should give your designer. You’ll get fewer photos on a card by shooting highres, but memory is cheap these days. The bad image you’ll get from using low-res pics in print jobs may just end up costing you a lot more than a few dollars. It’s your company’s image you’re talking about.
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