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Digital Photography Printing
Simplifying the Pixels and DPI's
by John Sollars
Digital photography printing has opened new avenues for amateur and professional
photographers alike. For most photographers, the backup of digital photography
printing offers unprecedented freedom to get the best shots. No more worrying
about wasting that precious piece of film running out, in addition to not
knowing for sure that anything worthwhile is on it!
However, when it comes to getting the printing done, there are a few things one
should keep in mind to prevent wasting too much of quality photo paper, and the
costly printing ink. In this article, we'll review a few basic terms related to
digital photography and offer a few tips on getting the best prints.
Resolution
Resolution refers to the 'image-sharpness' of a document, and is usually
measured in dots (or pixels) per inch (DPI). It also refers to the image-
sharpness that printers and monitors are capable of reproducing. Depending on
your particular needs, documents can be scanned at various resolutions. The
higher the resolution of a document, greater the image-sharpness, and larger the
file size will be.
With digital photography printing in mind, the first thing you need to ensure is
that you download the pictures at their full resolution. If in the end, you have
72dpi (dots per inch) pictures, your print quality will be useless. A 72dpi
resolution is good for viewing on your computer screen, but an image with 200 to
300dpi will give a good quality 8x10 inch print.
Pixel
Pixel is short for 'Picture Element.' It is the smallest part of a digital
image, and each image is comprised of thousands or millions of pixels. This
basic unit, from which a video or computer picture is made, is essentially a dot
with a given colour and brightness value. The more pixels an image has, the
higher the resolution of that image will be. One Megapixel is equal to one
million pixels.
JPEG
Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is a standards committee that designed
this image compression format. The compression format they designed is known as
a 'lossy' compression, as it deletes information from an image that it considers
unnecessary. JPEG files can range from small amounts of lossless compression to
large amounts of lossy compression. This is a common standard on the World Wide
Web, but the data loss generated in its compression makes it undesirable for
printing purposes.
When dealing with digital photography printing, you will mostly work with the
JPEG file format. Remember that every time you open and save a JPEG file, you
lose some of the image information. Therefore, it is advisable to do all the
changes in one sitting, and then save them only once.
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