Why do my web site photos not look good in print?

There is an easy answer to this - however it is not so easy to fix for your Promotional Marketing and advertising projects.

Photographs published on the web typically use a screen resolution of 72 dpi. Faxes typically have a dpi count of 150 and high quality litho printing uses 300 dpi. I very simplistic terms a web image needs to be at least 6 times the size of a printed image to have a similar quality.

To compound matters a printed image is usually needed a lot bigger than web image - when was the last time you saw an A5 or 8"x6" image on your monitor?

To compound matters further web images are usually compressed to make them smaller and save bandwidth.

Although photographs and monitor resolutions are generally measured in pixels ( see my last blog ) - it is best to think of pixels and dpi as two totally separate measurements.

It is also better to think of the dpi on an inkjet printer ie:600x600 or 720, 1440 etc as yet another measurement. We output our 300dpi photographs to our printing plates at 3600dpi output resolution.

After the techie stuff - how do you fix it?

Try and take your photos at the best resolution possible
Keep the files
Downsize a copy to put on the web - Keep the original
If all else fails we have had some success at maintaining a reasonable quality so long as they are not enlarged too much.
The cost of fixing the photos is probably more than taking the photo again

Best of Luck

Gordon Flavell
www.flavell.com