Inspiring

Answered

Working resolution for eventual printed user guide?

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
December 19, 2019
6 replies
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What resolution or other default settings should I be working with, if the end result will appear in a printed glossy user guide? The kind with stiff plasticy pages and ringed binding.

Hi. In my new job, I have been assigned the task of making a glossy color Quick Start How To Guide for a medical imaging software application. It will be about 9.5" x 7”, and primarily a flip book with, like, a curved arrow showing a series of steps represented by a circle for each step that is photo imagery of what button or menu to be utilized. Other pages will have larger photos.

This will employ a combination of licensed Adobe clip art photos of surgeons, etc. with screen shots of the product, which some photos pasted in to represent the camera feed sent to the software from an medical imaging scope during actual procedures.

I’ve never dealt with printed media before, other than homemade birthday cards.

So, what foundational resolution and other settings are recommended when it comes to making the pages for this sort of user guide?

Thanks!

How to

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Correct answer TheDigitalDog

That 72 dpi is just a tag and plays no role in the actual data (pixels) but it can be used to define the output size if someone uses it alone to determine the output size.

PPI has absolutely no role in quality per se. It is simply a resolution tag. Again, this tag provides a possible size IF used to divide up those pixels.

The tag could be 72PPI or 180PPI but it doesn't have an inherent meaning, only what you could produce with the number of pixels you have at your disposal. Work with pixels! For example, let us say you have 1000x1000 pixels to keep the math simple. And to simplify this further, let's only consider the horizontal axis. If you have 1000 pixels and divide that by 72, that is, you provide 72 pixels per inch, you could end up with 13.8 inches using that division (1000/72=13.8). Let's now say you divide up your 1000 pixels using 180 instead. 1000/180=5.5. In both cases, you had 1000 total pixels. The document itself doesn't have a size, other than what space it takes up on your hard drive. The sizes above are examples of what could be produced if you divided up the total number of pixels you have, with some number of which is just a tag within the document. In Photoshop, if you use the Image Size dialog, turn resample OFF (do not allow it to create more or remove pixels), you can enter any value, 72, 180, 1000 into the resolution field and the resulting size is calculated for you. But you haven’t changed the document or the data at all. You just changed a theoretical 'size' if you output your 1000 pixels using that resolution. So again, it's meaningless until you output the data. At that point, lets say you print the image, you can decide how big you wish it to appear and/or how many pixels you want to devote to the output. You have 1000 pixels and someone tells you that you must use 300DPI (which isn't true but that's a different story). 1000/300 would produce a 3.3 inch print. You want a bigger print? Lower the DPI (within reason). You set the DPI for output to use 180 of your pixels to produce 180DPI? You get a 5.5 inch print (1000/180=5.5).

jane-e

Community Expert

“I will start looking at InDesign now as I have never seen it before.”

Hi Todd,

InDesign is not intuitive when you first open it up, and spending a bit of time learning it first will save countless hours of cleanup later.

Be sure to start with David Blatner’s course on LinkedIn Learning (formerly lynda.com) called “InDesign 2020 Essential Training”. It is a paid site, but the first month is free and some libraries and schools include a subscription. Alternatively, you can take a course with an Adobe Certified Instructor. Here is the link for ACIs — you can filter to software, country, and province on the left. Most offer online as part of a live course if none are near you, or you can opt for private instruction.

https://learning.adobe.com/partner-finder.html?products=InDesign

Jane

Conrad_C

Community Expert

ToddDScope asked: “Or does it matter? e.g. the default for Windows Print Screen and the Snip tool is 72 dpi. Will that not end up pixelated if it is dumped into a 300 dpi document?”

This answer is more complicated that it looks at first. 72 dpi doesn't even come into play here. I opened the two Windows screen shot tools (Windows 10 says the Snipping Tool is being replaced by Snip & Sketch), and neither displays or lets you set the default ppi. And they should not.

What matters are the pixel dimensions of the screen shots, divided by the dimensions you would like to print them on the page. This results in the “effective resolution” that Jane-e described. For example, if you take a screen shot of a software dialog box that is 600 x 400 pixels, to print that at 300 ppi it must be printed at two inches wide. That's because 600 pixels divided by 300 pixels per inch is 2 inches. But your readers might think it looks too small at 2 inches, so screen shots are often printed at whatever size is readable. In this case, it might be a better idea to print the screen shot at 4 inches wide. That would result in 150 ppi. It's below what you'd want for a photograph or line art, but you have no choice if 600 x 400 is the number of pixels that the screen shot gives you. For screen shots this is not a big deal, people expect them to look a little jaggy because that's how screens are…

…or have been in the past…because that’s all changing. Now we have HiDPI (Windows) and Retina (Mac) computer displays. These display UI elements at typically twice the pixel density of older displays. This affects the amount of detail, and potential effective resolution. In your Windows display settings, if your Scale and Layout percentage is set to 100%, you will get the traditional low resolution jaggy screen shot. If it is above 100%, you will get more detail as Windows uses the additional pixels to increase detail (maintaining the apparent size of the UI), rather than add screen area (by shrinking the apparent size of UI elements). If you are using a HiDPI display, your UI scaling is probably set to 200%. (Note that the Scale and Layout percentage is not the same as the traditional screen resolution setting.)

Continuing the earlier example, a dialog box screen shot that would be 600 x 400 pixels on an older display might default to being rendered at 1200 x 800 pixels on a HiDPI display. This is great, because now when you scale that image to a readable 4 inches wide in InDesign, you get an effective resolution of 300 ppi (1200 pixels divided by 4 inches).

Whew! So the whole point of all that is:

The effective resolution of a screen shot on a printed page depends on how much you resized it on the layout.
The number of pixels in the screen shot depends on the Windows scaling setting, with a higher percentage producing more detailed UI elements, which is good for print resolution projects.
If you are using a HiDPI display, chances are it is going to default to 200% UI scaling in Windows.

(For Mac users, the same thing happens on Retina displays if you change the “looks like” setting in the macOS Displays preference: It affects the pixel density of your screen shots.)

T

ToddDSAuthor

Inspiring

"This answer is more complicated that it looks at first. 72 dpi doesn't even come into play here."

It comes into play for me specficially because the dpi cannot be changed. I am accostum to snipping screen shots, but they are 72 dpi regardless of what my display is or what it is set to. I find no way to get anything but 72 dpi.

I see I can choose dpi prior to pasting in this modern PS, but it scales the screen shot down tremendously when set to 300 dpi.

However, I am not expecting to enlarge images for this booklet. I try to start with as large an image as possible, since scaling down doesn't result in the same pixelation or "jagged edges" mentioned above. And the image I will actually be using are considerably larger than they need to be in the booklet.

It sounds like using 300 dpi for the initial images will be sufficent for the insuring the photography will print uniformly, and not have some photos more pixelated than others.

Thanks for all the replies. I will start looking at InDesign now as I have never seen it before.

TheDigitalDogCorrect answer

Inspiring

That 72 dpi is just a tag and plays no role in the actual data (pixels) but it can be used to define the output size if someone uses it alone to determine the output size.

PPI has absolutely no role in quality per se. It is simply a resolution tag. Again, this tag provides a possible size IF used to divide up those pixels.

The tag could be 72PPI or 180PPI but it doesn't have an inherent meaning, only what you could produce with the number of pixels you have at your disposal. Work with pixels! For example, let us say you have 1000x1000 pixels to keep the math simple. And to simplify this further, let's only consider the horizontal axis. If you have 1000 pixels and divide that by 72, that is, you provide 72 pixels per inch, you could end up with 13.8 inches using that division (1000/72=13.8). Let's now say you divide up your 1000 pixels using 180 instead. 1000/180=5.5. In both cases, you had 1000 total pixels. The document itself doesn't have a size, other than what space it takes up on your hard drive. The sizes above are examples of what could be produced if you divided up the total number of pixels you have, with some number of which is just a tag within the document. In Photoshop, if you use the Image Size dialog, turn resample OFF (do not allow it to create more or remove pixels), you can enter any value, 72, 180, 1000 into the resolution field and the resulting size is calculated for you. But you haven’t changed the document or the data at all. You just changed a theoretical 'size' if you output your 1000 pixels using that resolution. So again, it's meaningless until you output the data. At that point, lets say you print the image, you can decide how big you wish it to appear and/or how many pixels you want to devote to the output. You have 1000 pixels and someone tells you that you must use 300DPI (which isn't true but that's a different story). 1000/300 would produce a 3.3 inch print. You want a bigger print? Lower the DPI (within reason). You set the DPI for output to use 180 of your pixels to produce 180DPI? You get a 5.5 inch print (1000/180=5.5).

Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management/pluralsight"

jane-e

Community Expert

Hi

When you choose File > Place in InDesign, you place a link to the image. If the image is scaled in InDesign, the Effective PPI will change, and it’s the Effective PPI that matters. For example, if you scale an image that is 300 ppi (actual) to twice that size, the effective ppi is 150. Watch your links panel. If you scale the image to half the size, the effective ppi will be 600. There’s more to this, and you might want to ask on the InDesign forum.

~ Jane

TheDigitalDog

Inspiring

Ask what linescreen is being used for output. Multiply that by 1.5 to 2X* and that's the answer.

LPI is 133, 266 is the answer with this caveat*: as the linescreen gets higher, say about 150lpi, you can move from 2X to 1.5X.

Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management/pluralsight"

S

SJRiegel

Legend

For a book, it would be worth your while to do the final layout in InDesign. It does a better job of handling text, and will make the task of working with multiple pages much easier.

davescm

Community Expert

This is one ot the few occasions when 300 ppi is the correct answer :-). (The smile is because we usually have a discussion about whether 300 ppi is correct for posters and billboards viewed from 20 feet away, where such resolution is wasted).

Set your document to have the physical size you need and the resolution to be 300 ppi. It will be fine to print.

One thing to consider though. Whilst you can layout pages in Photoshop, Adobe's InDesign is the best tool for that job. So you would prepare your images in Photoshop then lay them out with print in InDesign.

Dave

D Fosse

Community Expert

Yes. This is what InDesign was born to do. Photshop is not a good tool for this. It can be done, but clumsily and with a lot of extra work and workarounds.

Photoshop is for images. Not text and graphics like diagrams etc. Too many peole think Photoshop will do everything.

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