Canon EOS 1000D - Shooting in 300dpi

Morning/Afternoon all,

I have a slight issue.

Part of my job is to photograph products, edit in photoshop to clients required size and send them off for them to post on websites/magazines etc.

Now I have never had an issue with this before, the camera produces a JPEG image at 72dpi, and a CR2 image at 240dpi duplicate, so i've had plenty of choice and with 300dpi being the general required size, it's never been an issue to just whack 300dpi in PSD image size.

Now a company has said it's not accepting the images recently because they haven't been shot in 300dpi, I personally don't see how they can tell when i've been using 240dpi images and bumping it up a little bit? Any ideas how I can resolve this?

And also, these products are garden buildings, extremely landscape as you can imagine, and they would like them in A4 portait without stretch, now I didn't take these photo's so they're all landscape, can this be done in PSD without stretching? or do they physically need to be reshot?

Thanks in advance for any advice/help/tips etc.

Simon

I don't think it's you who has the issue but your client, who obviously has a little knowledge but think they know it all.
('a little learning is a dangerous thing' - Alexander Pope).

I know of no digital camera which outputs images at 300dpi - which is a measure used in reproduction anyway.

I'm afraid you could have a problem convincing the client that they are misunderstanding the whole digital process.

dpi has nothing to do with resolution, its ONLY for printing.

you can print a 14 MP image at 72 dpi and make it the size of a massive poster, or you could print the same image at 30000 dpi and you'd need a microscope to view it.

DPI is calculated by dividing the document's pixels by the document's inches... It's mathematically impossible for DPI to be anything else. That's about all there is to know about DPI.

I think the confusion arises when DPI is thought of as the quality of the digital file.. It's not.. If more people thought of it as the physical size of the printed image in inches, it would be more easily understood.

For instance.. If you open your 72 dpi 1000D files, you'll see the document size is 54 inches by 36 inches.. In landscape mode, the image width is 3888 pixels and 54 inches. If you divide 3888 pixels by 54 inches, you have 72 pixels per inch.. In other words, if you spread 3888 pixels evenly across 54 inches, you'll have 72 pixels in each inch. ... It's simple division.

The size in inches can be changed without changing the pixels in the image file. As Alexei TND points out in his post above, DPI meaningless until you actually want to print the image. THEN you have the actual inches you intend to spread the pixels across.

But, there still are many outfits who have 300 DPI stuck in their heads as the ultimate quality of an image file,,,, Rather than argue, I'd just convert my 100D images to 12.6 inches by 8.64 inches before sending them off.. Then they'll be 300 DPI.

May I respectfully suggest that both you and your clients watch THIS video by Deke McClelland.

It is a good reference for understanding image sizing.

A4 paper is basically 5x7. Crop your image to 5x7 (or a ratio of 1:1.414), save it at 300 DPI, resize it if needed without changing DPI (their are some great fractal based resizing program available if you need to enlarge), send it to the customer, chuckle under you breath at how ignorant they are about DPI, and get on with your life. Do not complain to them, do not point out their ignorance, just give them what they want and move on.