Understanding Export Quality Settings in Lightroom Classic

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
June 6, 2022
3 replies
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I'm having a hard time understanding if I should let the image sizing box do its own thing or if I should manually enter 300dpi for every photo I want to export for printing. The pixel count doesn't change so will changing the dpi make a difference in print quality?

Windows

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DS256

Inspiring

"I'm having a hard time understanding if I should let the image sizing box do its own thing or if I should manually enter 300dpi for every photo I want to export for printing" My understanding is that the RESOLUTION option only comes into play when you are selecting a physical dimension in the export. For example, in the following, I select 8x10 inches.

The resulting image is 2400 (10x240) x 1690 (240x8=1920 but it's cropped) pixels.

dj_paige

Legend

... or if I should manually enter 300dpi for every photo I want to export for printing.

You can't enter 300dpi (dot per inch) in the Lightroom Classic Export dialog box. You could enter 300ppi (pixels per inch) but there are two extremely different things — dot per inch meaning how many dots of ink a printer will use per inch, and pixels per inch, meaning how many pixels of the photo get printed per inch. These both are entirely meaningless if you are not going to print anything. They do not affect digital images. They only affect printed images. And if you are going to print something, you can only control ppi from Lightroom Classic.

MelodyanneMAuthor

Participating Frequently

My apologies I see now that it is indeed ppi in the dialog box but when I look at the file properties it is labeled as dpi and that does change based on what I entered in the ppi dialog box. So still not sure what I should be doing but it seems to me letting Lightroom do its own thing there is reasonable.

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DS256

Inspiring

Pixels vary based on how much cropping was done. I'm trying to figure out
how big I can print.

Melody M

"Pixels vary based on how much cropping was done. I'm trying to figure out
how big I can print." LrC will attempt to enlarge an image that is smaller than the requested export size. The 'Do Not Enlarge' prevents this from happening.
You may want to explore some on-line pixel to print calculators like the following. Note that the distance the print is being viewed from is one of the parameters https://www.omnicalculator.com/other/pixels-to-print-size