Printing Tiny Images

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
September 7, 2018
2 replies
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I want to make some stickers. I have good quality images (their resolutions are about 2500x900) and I resized them to about 3 cm to 1 cm. This made the images ppi about 900. Those are okay so far. But when I want to print them to an A4, their qualities seem low. What can I do to print them in good quality?

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Correct answer D Fosse

Printing always softens an image a bit, because the ink spreads a little in the paper.

In addition, the resizing/scaling itself will soften them more. Even if you send them full-res to the printer, the printer driver scales them down.

So, common practice if you want the best possible quality, is to sharpen at final print size in Photoshop. You don't need 900 ppi here, that's wasted. Most printers have an optimum resolution - Epsons, for instance, produce the best results at 360 ppi. But this varies a bit.

For the sharpening, don't overdo it, take care to avoid halos. You just want to tighten the edges. The ACR filter is excellent for this.

D Fosse

Correct answer

Community Expert

Printing always softens an image a bit, because the ink spreads a little in the paper.

In addition, the resizing/scaling itself will soften them more. Even if you send them full-res to the printer, the printer driver scales them down.

So, common practice if you want the best possible quality, is to sharpen at final print size in Photoshop. You don't need 900 ppi here, that's wasted. Most printers have an optimum resolution - Epsons, for instance, produce the best results at 360 ppi. But this varies a bit.

For the sharpening, don't overdo it, take care to avoid halos. You just want to tighten the edges. The ACR filter is excellent for this.