If you’re designing something that is going to be held in someone’s hand, such as a brochure or flyer, then the optimum DPI is 300DPI. Whilst printing method and material will affect image quality only slightly, viewing distance affects your required resolution in a number of ways, simply because if you stand further away from an image, the pixels seem smaller. Many people don’t even take distance into account, but it can actually mean the difference between 300DPI and 3DPI.
It doesn’t seem obvious, but viewing distance is a very significant factor in finding your perfect resolution. To work this out, you’ll need to consider another important factor: viewing distance. That said, choosing your optimum resolution is all about discerning at what point you can no longer see the pixels in an image. Anything lower than 300DPI can seriously damage the quality of your image. This is the perfect resolution for all printing materials, and since 354DPI is the maximum resolution an offset printing machine can handle, anything beyond that will only increase your digital file size, with no improvement in quality.
To help you navigate the confusing world of print resolution, ChilliPrinting are here to offer you some hot tips. Print resolution can get very technical very quickly, and sometimes it feels like it’s not worth getting in to. When it comes to source images, bigger is always better. One of the most common problems faced by printing companies, is clients uploading digital files with a resolution that is too low to print. For example, an enormous billboard can be printed with a lower DPI than a small leaflet, even though it’s larger in size. The only consideration is that you’ll need different resolutions depending on how large the printed image will be, where it will be displayed, and how it will be printed. Make sure your image has the highest resolution and image dimensions you can get. You can always scale down in size, but never scale up at least not without losing quality. A general rule: the higher the resolution, the better the image. When you’re creating your source image (the image you want to be printed), make sure it has a suitable resolution. When it comes to printing, resolution is super important, as a high-quality image looks beautiful and professional, whereas a low-resolution image looks fuzzy, indistinct and completely unprofessional. The more dots (of ink) that are printed per inch, the higher the resolution of the image – therefore the higher the quality in terms of sharpness and detail. Higher resolution means higher detail, and can be measured in dots per inch (DPI). Print Resolution is simply the level of detail in a printed image.