Images: some differences between online and print use

We take pictures on our phones all of the time. Of family, events, and day-to-day stuff. The quality of these photos varies by phone and camera type, but in general, these days, phone cameras a far better than they ever where, in some case, they may even approach what you’d get with an actual camera. However, when it comes to picture usage, there are some applications where you do need to be sure of your quality, for example:

• When you’re printing out your photos, particularly if you’re enlarging them
• when using your photos in printed material, such as brochures and posters

Lets go into those two areas in greater detail.

Photo Enlargements

Here’s a common scenario. We take a family photo at Thanksgiving, everyone’s happy and smiling, and the picture looks great on our phone, so we get it printed at an enlarged size for everyone, but when you get the prints, they look grainy, or washout out, or pixelated. This is one of those times that you wished that you’d either used a dedicated camera, or that you’d increased the resolution and quality of your phone’s camera. For these situations, here’s how to change your phone camera’s picture quality:

A few points top note:

• Resolution describes how many pixels (dots) are in the image. The greater the number of pixels, the greater the image looks when you print it out
• Megapixel is a measurement of the quantity of information saved in an image. One megapixel is approximately 1 million pixels (or dots) that creates the image. It’s usually abbreviated ‘MP’

Setting Image Resolution on Android Cameras

Remember that each phone and camera will have it’s own way of setting picture resolution, so this is a general guide. For instance, the camera app icon maybe on the screen, in a menu within the Control icon, or in a Menu icon. For the standard Android app:

1. Touch the ‘Control’ icon. Additional icons appear
2. Select the ‘More Options’ icon. Touch it and a new set of icons appears
3. Select the ‘Picture Size’ icon. The ‘Picture Size’ menu appears
4. Select an available resolution. in general, QVGA is the lowest, followed by VGA, then other megapixel sizes. Select the highest.

Resolution on iOS Cameras

When it comes to cameras, iPhones work differently to Android phones as you can’t change the picture resolution. You can change the size of you images, however, with the default Photo app, or an app from the App Store. Remember though, that just because you increase the physical size of a picture, it doesn’t increase the resolution of the picture, so be careful about how much you enlarge.

Photos for professional print

When it comes to printed brochures, flyers, and posters, you need the highest resolution that you can get. This is because when you create a job for lithographic or digital print, the photograph that you’ve taken, which is already composed of thousands of dots, is then broken down again into more dots, normally at a resolution of 300 dots per inch (DPI), but the exact DPI depends on whether the final print quality and process, for instance, are you using digital print (essentially a giant, high-quality ink jet or laser printer – good for short runs) or lithographic (traditional, high quality print process, using large, professional offset printing machines – good for longer print runs or higher quality work)?

For this reason, you need the highest quality pictures that you can get for your print projects,because you want your brochures to look good, and portray your business as professionally as possible.

Photos for online use

For online usage, like Facebook or for your website, the resolution isn’t quite so critical. The quality still needs to be good, since you want to present a professional online presence, but the resolution can be much lower, since whatever resolution your image is, the screen will only present it at 72 DPI, as opposed to the 300 dpi of print media. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have higher-quality pics on your website; since screens can present 1,920 pixels at least these days, your images will still look sharp and clear.

We hope this short article has been useful and informative. If you need any help or advice on pictures, pixels, or printing, get in touch with us and we’ll help you out.