Resolution for Print: 240 PPI vs. 300 PPI ??

I'm a little confused about PPI. I just signed up with WHCC printing and their site says to keep everything at 300 PPI.

Well when I go to save to jpg. for print, Photoshop CS3 is stating my image is at 240 PPI.

So I brought this up to a rep on the phone and he said "okay, just leave it. no sense in raising it to 300 ppi becuase your just adding information that isn't there". So I guess that make sense...

But my question is if the standard is 300 PPI, why is my CS3 only putting out 240 PPI ??

Some places require images being at 300 ppi, but even what that means can be confusing. So, it's good you got that cleared up.

There are two ways your image can "be 300ppi":

One is that whatever pixel resolution you have you will tell Photoshop to set the exif tag to 300 ppi. You don't resize resample the image, you just tag it. Some commercial printers may be happy with that tag, but most print shops/labs will not care -- you are ordering a print at a size in inches and their printer will do that regardless what the ppi tag says.

The other thing is that if you are preparing an image to print at a certain size and either you or the lab specifically requires that at a given size you need a specific resolution in pixels, which they specify as 300 ppi. That may be what WHCC was saying, so that for, say, an 8x12 print they would want at least 2400x3600 pixels. That is considered an "optimal" resolution for a good print. But, as you've seen, there is a "fudge factor" when it comes to ppi and print quality, so it's often just fine at a lesser level.

Here are a couple threads from the FAQ sticky for you to check out:

DPI/PPI:

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=83445

Printing/Enlargement:

https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?p=3740438

tonylong wrote in post #12210857
Some places require images being at 300 ppi, but even what that means can be confusing. So, it's good you got that cleared up.

There are two ways your image can "be 300ppi":

One is that whatever pixel resolution you have you will tell Photoshop to set the exif tag to 300 ppi. You don't resize resample the image, you just tag it. Some commercial printers may be happy with that tag, but most print shops/labs will not care -- you are ordering a print at a size in inches and their printer will do that regardless what the ppi tag says.

The other thing is that if you are preparing an image to print at a certain size and either you or the lab specifically requires that at a given size you need a specific resolution in pixels, which they specify as 300 ppi. That may be what WHCC was saying, so that for, say, an 8x12 print they would want at least 2400x3600 pixels. That is considered an "optimal" resolution for a good print. But, as you've seen, there is a "fudge factor" when it comes to ppi and print quality, so it's often just fine at a lesser level.

Here are a couple threads from the FAQ sticky for you to check out:

DPI/PPI:

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=83445

Printing/Enlargement:

https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?p=3740438

wow, i read this post like 3 times and i'm still not quite understanding it... your basically stating don't worry about it? i'm sorry bro, i'm confused.

my test prints from WHCC were all 8x0 and for whatever reason, didn't come out as sharp as they are on my monitor. do you think that has anything to do with this ?

m.shalaby wrote in post #12210904
wow, i read this post like 3 times and i'm still not quite understanding it... your basically stating don't worry about it? i'm sorry bro, i'm confused.

my test prints from WHCC were all 8x0 and for whatever reason, didn't come out as sharp as they are on my monitor. do you think that has anything to do with this ?

Many people do "output" sharpening for prints using the Print Size in Photoshop to preview for sharpnes for that size.

If you are getting soft images at an 8x10 print size (I assume that's what you meant) then it won't be because of your ppi/resolution unless you either severly cropped the image or because you resized it to a much smaller size -- check out the files that you actually uploaded to them and see what the image size in pixels is, and also check your jpeg quality settings. An image that has been sized to fit a Web view will tend to produce a very lousy 8x10!

There are two kinds of ppi; the tag and the real ppi.
The tag is just a number that is stuck into the Exif info because the rules say there has to be some number there. Somebody once compared it to the recommended number of portions on a box of noodles. In reality you can eat it all by yourself or give twenty people tiny portions. In reality the real ppi is the number of pixels you have divided by the number of inches of print they have to cover. The printer says 300 ppi, but if you give him a different amount he will add or subtract pixels to make it 300.

m.shalaby wrote in post #12210904
my test prints from WHCC were all 8x0 and for whatever reason, didn't come out as sharp as they are on my monitor. do you think that has anything to do with this ?

At what distance are you viewing the prints from? Large prints are not meant to be viewed at close distances. Put it on a wall and stand 5 feet away. How does it look?

tonylong wrote in post #12211358
Many people do "output" sharpening for prints using the Print Size in Photoshop to preview for sharpnes for that size.

If you are getting soft images at an 8x10 print size (I assume that's what you meant) then it won't be because of your ppi/resolution unless you either severly cropped the image or because you resized it to a much smaller size -- check out the files that you actually uploaded to them and see what the image size in pixels is, and also check your jpeg quality settings. An image that has been sized to fit a Web view will tend to produce a very lousy 8x10!

Okay, again some of your lingo is going above my head. Here’s exactly what I did and perhaps you can see the error?

I cropped a little off the top and bottom. I do all my PP to the full sized images. My full size images were like 22inches x 14inches about. So I scaled them down to 10x7, accepting a little white trim around the edges.

Then I saved as jpg, 240ppi and left quality high at 12. – loaded them to WHCC and came in the slightly softer looking images. They by no means look lousy, but just not as sharp as on my screen.

Anything I should of done differently?

Yes, stop thinking in terms of inches. Think about pixels. Digital images don't have inches or feet or centimeters, only pixels. Your native image is 3744x5616 pixels. If you put all those pixels on an 8x10 print the real ppi would be 468, not 240. When you say you "scaled them down" do you mean you cropped out a section 1680x2400, less than a quarter of the original, or that you resampled the whole frame down to 1680x2400? If the former, you really need to get closer to your subject. If the latter, that amount of resampling will have to be resharpened after the downsize.
Also, I imagine your monitor is uncalibrated and is, therefore, probably very contrasty. Sharpness is contrast and because of this the screen will always look sharper than the print which has a more limited contrast range.

tzalman wrote in post #12213076
Yes, stop thinking in terms of inches. Think about pixels. Digital images don't have inches or feet or centimeters, only pixels. Your native image is 3744x5616 pixels. If you put all those pixels on an 8x10 print the real ppi would be 468, not 240. When you say you "scaled them down" do you mean you cropped out a section 1680x2400, less than a quarter of the original, or that you resampled the whole frame down to 1680x2400? If the former, you really need to get closer to your subject. If the latter, that amount of resampling will have to be resharpened after the downsize.
Also, I imagine your monitor is uncalibrated and is, therefore, probably very contrasty. Sharpness is contrast and because of this the screen will always look sharper than the print which has a more limited contrast range.

thanks for the input. Heres what I did.

I didn’t crop the image down to 1680x2400. I cropped it to taste at native size, then resampled it down to 1680x2400 to fit it on an 8x10 print.

So I take it, I should do a little more sharpening after the resampling?? But the resampled image down to 1680x2400 is still much sharper then my print. I don’t want to go sharpening crazy, you know?

I did calibrate my monitor to the prints (brightness/contrast) – to my surprise the colors were pretty accurate. So the contrast/brightness matches, but even still, the prints aren’t as sharp as my screen.

m.shalaby wrote in post #12213109
the prints aren’t as sharp as my screen.

Sharpen after resize. If the printing company doesn't sharpen, you need to.
A file that's properly sharpened for print, will look horribly oversharpened on screen:

http://www.creativepro​.com …ening-workflow?page=0%2C1

René Damkot wrote in post #12213417
Sharpen after resize. If the printing company doesn't sharpen, you need to.
A file that's properly sharpened for print, will look horribly oversharpened on screen:

http://www.creativepro​.com …ening-workflow?page=0%2C1

really? hmmm.... so do some oversharpening on screen and hope it comes out like I want in print? thats it? seems like a non-exact-science....

m.shalaby wrote in post #12213663
...seems like a non-exact-science....

Yeah... Some might call it an art!

https://photography-on-the.net …p?p=11416969&po​stcount=13
https://photography-on-the.net …p?p=11912713&po​stcount=12

I leave my default output on LR at 240 and haven't had any issues with WHCC on that front. I would try doing some output sharpening for print, as Tony mentioned earlier and see how your results come out.

Snydremark wrote in post #12214516
I leave my default output on LR at 240 and haven't had any issues with WHCC on that front. I would try doing some output sharpening for print, as Tony mentioned earlier and see how your results come out.

This statement seems to echo the fact that 'EXIF DPI value' does not matter to vendors like WHCC, they want PIXELS PER INCH (what they might call 'DPI' in their statement, but what is truly 'PPI') to be 300 pixels per inch minimum value in the desired print size.