[font=Arial]Can someone please help me with some basic Photoshop questions?![/font]
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[font=Arial]I work with Ps every day, and have done for the past few years, and no matter how embarrassing this is (!), I have a big black hole concerning pictures quality. Every time questions about this surfaces, I somehow manage to do right without even knowing what I did when I’m done![/font]
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[font=Arial]My problem can be summed up in one question: [/font]
[font=Arial]”How can I the easiest way find out which quality a picture has in Ps?”
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[font=Arial]Now and then I get sent .jpg-files to me by e-mail, as I did today.
[/font][font=Arial]Since I’m working on a PC I double clicked on the filename attached to the mail, chose “Open file” and the picture automatically opens in Microsoft Photoeditor. Here I right-click on the picture, copy it, and then opens PS. In Ps I’m opening a new window (Ctrl+n) and PS suggests a file size that has a resolution on 96 ppi and a transparent background. I paste my picture. I now have a picture that has a resolution on 96 ppi.[/font]
[font=Arial]This is the first version.
[/font][font=Arial]Second version:
[/font][font=Arial]I double-click on the filename attached to the mail, chose “Open file” and the picture automatically opens in Microsoft Photoeditor. Here I right-click on the picture, copy the picture, and then opens PS. In Ps I’m opening a new window (Ctrl+n) and instead of letting Ps suggest a resolution, I enter 300 (since I’m going to print this picture) and I chose transparent background. I get the window, and I paste my picture. I now have the same picture as I did from before, but now with much higher quality.
[/font][font=Arial]Third version:
[/font][font=Arial]I double-click on the filename attached to the mail, chose “Save file on disk”. Then I’m opening Ps and open the file from there (Ctrl+o). The same picture from before opens but now with a resolution of 72 ppi.
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[font=Arial]I just don’t get it! I have three versions of the same picture, one 300ppi, one 96 ppi, and the last 72 ppi. Which is the right one?
300dpi is the best for print. Although if you are pasting the pic in there it might make the picture seem really small. If this is happening then use 72dpi. I have printed with this rez before and it came out a-o-k. But I would suggest before printing set the print size to 90% in the Print Preview screen. It will be slighly smaller but will make the pic that much clearer.
DPIs don’t have any effect if you do not take into account the document size. Try understand that an A3 sized image (A3 is double the size of A4 documents for non-European users) at 150 DPIs is the EXACT same this as an A4 document at 300DPIs…
If you look carefully, since your 3 images do have the same quality, the 72 dpi must be bigger (in terms of canvas size, NOT PIXELS) than the 96 than the 300 dpi…
What I advise you to do is always check quality of an image with it’s pixel size, not it’s DPI (or if you do then make sure to take into account the canvas size)
As DJ Studio said, the base quality for printing documents without pixelization is 300dpi, at real document size. Which means that for example if you’re printing a 3" x 6" picture then create your document 3" x 6" at 300 dpi…
(which would be 900 x 1800 pixels)
to add to what mlk and dj said, i would always open the jpg into photoshop (clt-o) method over copy and pasting, by opening the file in photoshop you will get to see what the documents real attributes are. (dpi, document size, document colour setting(CMYK/RGB)).
basically , the way i like to think of it is like this:
as long as you just want an image for viewing on your monitor, 72 dpi is all you need. so if you have a 4 X 6 photo scanned in at 72 dpi, it will look perfect at its normal size. if you zoom in closer its going to get pixelated, and if you zoom out it’ll just get smaller. if you take that same scanned in image and manually change the dpi to like 300, the picture just gets way bigger but the quality doesnt magically improve. to keep file sizes small, you know, like when you put a pic on the web, i always keep them 72dpi because you get max quality and smallest file size. to answer you very first question, open up your document in PS and go to image >image size…all the juicy info is right there.
