More on resolution. (Moron resolution?)

I am, to be frank, a bit obsessive. Thus, my never-ending quest to help explain how resolution works for folks who don’t deal with it every day.

To recap, everybody asks for 300dpi digital files, which is well-meaning and sounds reasonable enough, but it’s just not correct. 300dpi is only part of a measurement for file sizes: we need to know 300dpi at what size.

Sometimes people push back and say things like, “This file won’t work. It’s not 300dpi.” And I try to explain that any file can be 300dpi. Then I sound like a jerk, and they still don’t believe me, and it’s a lose-lose all around.

Which brings me to this, which I found yesterday while surfing around the web site of the best photo lab in St. Louis (in my humble opinion), Allied Photocolor. Whenever someone asks me where they should go for anything photo/digital/lab/printing related, I refer them to Allied. Pro labs like this are a dying breed all across the country. I’m hoping that Allied’s skill will keep them around for a long, long time.

On their site is some helpful information of the sort about which I’m speaking. (How’s that for a grammatically correct sentence?) And it contains two Photoshop image size screenshots that tell the resolution story much better than I can.

In the end, it’s all about Pixel Dimensions. That “300dpi” thing only refers to how those pixels are allocated. As you can see, changing the resolution from 150dpi to 300dpi doesn’t affect the Pixel Dimensions unless you keep the document size the same. An 8×10 at 300dpi IS EXACTLY THE SAME PIXEL DIMENSIONS as a 16×20 at 150dpi. That’s right: one of them is 150dpi and one of them is 300dpi, but they are exactly the same file size. They’re, in fact, actually the same file. You’re just allocating more pixels per inch, or less pixels per inch, to change the physical printable size. That 150dpi 16×20 will print EXACTLY THE SAME as a 300dpi 8×10.

Trust me. Or trust Allied. It’s just the way it is.

Any questions, let me know…

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Helpful Digital Image Information for Clients

I’m clearly not doing a very good job on my personal mission of helping to inform the masses how digital image resolution works, because I’m still getting the same number of requests that are… well there’s no nice way to say it… wrong.

This is not a unique problem isolated to a few under-informed souls. Many people, dare I say most, just really don’t understand how digital image resolution works.

The real issue is when my client, say a marketing director at a large corporation, is stuck in the middle between what I’m telling her and what her in-house graphics person is telling her. And it’s bound to make her unhappy, make more work for her, and ultimately shake her confidence in me.

This is a big problem.

So here’s the thing to remember: 300dpi doesn’t matter. I know you’ve been told it’s the ONLY thing that matters, but that’s wrong. The resolution of 300dpi only matters when you know AT WHAT SIZE it is to be used. Period.

The very same image file can have dots-per-inch allocated at 300dpi (for, say, a 5×7 print) or 150 (for an 10×14 print) or 30 (for a 50×70 print) ad infinitum. Those three examples are all the same file with the same exact number of pixels.

The only thing that matters is how many dots are actually there–the area resolution, or total pixel count, of an image. In the example I just mentioned, it’s 1500×1700 pixels. At 300 dots per inch, you can turn those 1500 pixels into 5 inches, and the 2100 pixels into 7 inches. If I change the resolution from 300dpi to 150dpi, I don’t have to change the number of pixels–just how they’re allocated in every inch.

No matter how many times I talk about this I’m still not convinced that it’s understood. It’s a tricky math-related thing to understand, so I’m definitely not faulting anybody for this. Except for when they say that I’m wrong. I’m not. Trust me.

What I really want to know is this: would you, my marketing/pr/advertising/corporate clients, be interested in a brief training session for employees who deal with digital image files? In an hour or two I’m sure I could explain quite readily to the folks in your company who deal with image files exactly what all those numbers mean and exactly how they work to affect the quality of the image files you publish.

I think it would save everybody involved time, money and headaches.

So is this a great idea or an awful idea? Please, let me know…

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