DAFOS Photo World

The world is unjustly full of misunderstandings about Dots Per Inch, or “dpi”, sometime also referred to as “pixels per inch” or “ppi” (but then my cool title wouldn’t work… 😊 ).

For my work (day-job or as photographer) I often get asked to “send the picture to me in high resolution – 300dpi”: the person asking often doesn’t seem to realise that this is a meaningless request. In order to comply, I then have to ask “how many inches will the picture be printed to?”.

Silence…

I usually end up just sending the picture with the maximum number of pixels I have in the image, which is often a very big file and certainly “overkill” for most uses (with a file from my Canon 5DmkII, which has 21MPx, a 300dpi print would be about 30×45 cms big – roughly A3 size).

One time, to make a point, I sent a “300dpi” file which had 300px on each side, which is of course the same as 300dpi (ppi) for a 1 inch (2.5cms) square print, but which looks rather poor when printed on an A4 page…

The moral of this sorry tale? There are a few:

• Digital files don’t really know about “dpi”, as this refers to the physical size of a print. All they know about is pixels, and how many there are. The “dpi” data found in some digital files is calculated from: dpi = (number of pixels along a side of the print) / (length of the side of the print in inches) – literally “dots per inch”.
• Start thinking about your image in terms of how many pixels it has. Some typical applications have typical numbers of pixels for optimum use. See the table below.
• Learn how to re-size your digital pictures to give files with a suitable number of pixels. There are some tutorials on the Viewfinders web-site under “Resources” that can help with this.

Typical pixels needed for various uses: