Originally posted on LinkedIN
FRIDAY PSA for small business owners: Have you heard the term "300 dpi" and it's made your head swim? Do you want to avoid blurry images in your printed marketing materials? Then read on!
"dpi" stands for "dots per inch" (this could also mean "pixels per inch"). 300 dpi is an industry standard that basically spells out how much resolution your file needs to have in order to be printed with the best resolution (occasionally printers ask for more, or less, but that's another conversation...)
The biggest mistake I see in this industry is when someone sends a printer a low resolution file to print. It's a common mistake because our digital screens do a better job than paper at rendering images, even at low resolution. What we see onscreen can be plenty crisp and sharp at only 72 dpi, but when you bring that into a printed medium the same file will render blurry or pixelated.
So if you're printer says they need 300 dpi, you need to look at the following calculation:
(pixels of image)/300=number of inches that the file can be printed safely without sacrificing quality.
Here's an example:
My camera takes images that are 5568 pixels wide by 3712 pixels tall. That means the largest I can print images from my camera are:
(5568/300) by (3712/300) inches = 18.56 by 12.37 inches
So before you send that file to print, do this quick calculation and your printed piece will turn out just fine! #printing #highresolution #dpi
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