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I've recently has some pictures developed at a well known photographic store (i'm being politically correct) and to be honest the quality is atrocious. The colours seemed out of sync and they we're blury and loads of noise.
All the photo's had been cropped and sharpened in Elements. My uploads look fine as they do on my hard drive but the prints are awful.
Have I just had a bad batch of prints or has the cropping and sharpening caused my problem and if so how do I rectify this. Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Graham
An image with just 72 pixels per inch can look great as a web image or on your monitor, but awful if printed. An image for printing should be 300ppi or certainly a lot closer to 300 than 72.
Excessive cropping and sharpening can ruin an image that is to be printed.
Capto, I'm sorry but that's rather misleading. Stop talking about ppi and talk about resolution.
http://www.rideau-info.com/photos/mythdpi.html
Thinking about images that you put onto disc / card / stick to get printed we need to know the pixel dimensions. For example your epz uploads are 600 pixels by 400 pixels. In printing that's barely enough pixels for a decent 3" x 2" print. Sometimes you need 300 pixels for every inch you want to print. So for a 7" x 5" print ideally you'd have a digital image of 2100 x 1500. ([7x300] x [5x300]).
It's possible to print with less pixels but they'd need to be spaced further apart or software has to invent new pixels to fill in the gaps (interpolation). Real pixels and less gaps make better prints.
In Elements, you need to use Edit - Resize Image and enter the size you want in pixels, and select 'Resample'.
Of course the more you have cropped down in the first place the poorer the end result will be.
When you crop initially, you can enter the dimensions in pixels and it will resize automatically.
After taking a trip to a different printers I can comfirm that although some of the photographs were less than 300ppi the difference in printing quality is unbelievable. The first batch were in fact ****. But thanks especially to Sabreur for your comments and advice.
Graham
Quote: All the photo's had been cropped and sharpened in Elements. My uploads look fine as they do on my hard drive but the prints are awful.
There are a lot of questions.
Is your monitor colour managed? ( can you be sure the colours you see on screen are correct)
What colour space do you use(aRGB, sRGB etc)?
What colour space does the lab use?
What paper is it, again is the correct Profile applied (tho your lab should know this)?
You say Its sharpened, is this for the web or for print (they have completely different requirements)
My advise is to talk to the lab they are normally very helpful.
One thing just a quick look at your pf, I wouldn't be surprised if the reds in particular have real problems as they are probably have problems with the gamut ( highly saturated colours can be difficult to print ).
Quote: In Elements, you need to use Edit - Resize Image and enter the size you want in pixels, and select 'Resample'.
Quote: Thanks Sabreur, i've resized and now got 5x7's with more then 300ppi so gona get them printed and see if it works
Don't resample. Start with your original images, crop then print. Let lab/printer software upsample the image if there aren't enough pixels.
Why do I say that?
If you aim for 300ppi and PS invents new pixels to reach that goal [resamples] but the lab actually prints at 240ppi (lot of commercial labs do) pixels will be thrown away before printing. Some of them will have been real pixels from the camera others interpolated pixels invented by Photoshop. Your original image might have had enough pixels for a 240ppi print anyway and it's always better when possible to use real pixels.
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