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john paulm37954767
Participant
June 29, 2018
Answered

Does Resolution affect Physical size?

  • June 29, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 446 views

I have to create an advertisement for a local paper, i am pretty new to this.

The size of the advert is 265mm wide by 170mm tall, however when i create it at this size at the default 72 resolution its very blurry and looks awful. I decided to push the resolution up to 300 which made night and day difference, it now looks really crisp and sharp, however i am worried that it may have effected the physical size for use in the paper?

If this is the case and the image is now too large for the paper, how do i use the lower resolution at the required 265mm x 170mm and still achieve high quality?

Thank you for any answers/help!!

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer D Fosse

Resolution is physical size. That's the determinant.

The image itself is only pixels. This is important! Get to grips with this concept right away. Just pixels. It has no dimensions, it has no resolution. It's just an array of pixels, so many wide by so many high. This is the image size as Photoshop works with it.

Now, to print this, you need to decide how big these pixels should be on paper, the pixel density. That's where resolution comes in, and the physical print size is determined by how many pixels per inch. This defines a physical size of the pixel array.

The whole thing is given by the pixels per inch number. Just stop and consider what pixels per inch means. Read it literally, it means exactly what it says. No hidden meaning.

Now, you can use that inversely. If you have a ppi requirement, a certain density required, and you also have a requested physical print size, you can determine how many pixels you need in the file.

All these are straight calculations. Luckily, you don't need to take out your calculator, you can just let Photoshop's Image Size dialog do the math for you.

---

What resolution / density is required for print varies. In high quality book and magazine print the standard requirement is 300. Newsprint will usually require a lot less, perhaps 100-150. Large posters/banners/billboards can go as low as 10 or 15 because they will be bigger, but seen from much farther away.

So find out what ppi is required in this case, and at what physical size. With those two numbers, you can calculate how many pixels the file needs to have.

1 reply

D Fosse
Community Expert
D FosseCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
June 29, 2018

Resolution is physical size. That's the determinant.

The image itself is only pixels. This is important! Get to grips with this concept right away. Just pixels. It has no dimensions, it has no resolution. It's just an array of pixels, so many wide by so many high. This is the image size as Photoshop works with it.

Now, to print this, you need to decide how big these pixels should be on paper, the pixel density. That's where resolution comes in, and the physical print size is determined by how many pixels per inch. This defines a physical size of the pixel array.

The whole thing is given by the pixels per inch number. Just stop and consider what pixels per inch means. Read it literally, it means exactly what it says. No hidden meaning.

Now, you can use that inversely. If you have a ppi requirement, a certain density required, and you also have a requested physical print size, you can determine how many pixels you need in the file.

All these are straight calculations. Luckily, you don't need to take out your calculator, you can just let Photoshop's Image Size dialog do the math for you.

---

What resolution / density is required for print varies. In high quality book and magazine print the standard requirement is 300. Newsprint will usually require a lot less, perhaps 100-150. Large posters/banners/billboards can go as low as 10 or 15 because they will be bigger, but seen from much farther away.

So find out what ppi is required in this case, and at what physical size. With those two numbers, you can calculate how many pixels the file needs to have.

Participant
October 18, 2024

WOW. Great info and explained great. Much appreciated. 🙂

Stephen Marsh
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 18, 2024

Newspapers generally use halftone line screens of 85-100 lpi, so your ppi value can be 170-200 at the required physical print dimensions. 300 would be overkill. It should be noted that we are discussing image resolution for photo reproduction here, not rasterized graphic elements or text that would be reproduced using a much higher resolution.