Preserved Topic: printing from Photoshop

Yes, sometimes I need the image on a hard copy...

At school, they recommend that to build our portfolios, we make some nice images, and print them to put in the physical portfolio. So I dilligently worked the weekend away, and made a nice image. Looked good in Photoshop. I had to save it as a jpeg on a floppy, so I could take it to Kinko's to print out. Looked great as a high quality jpeg. And then Kinko's printed it for me, full color, on glossy paper...
and it has jaggies! The computer image looks better! It's not awful, but when viewed close up, the jaggies are undeniably there. Which I hate.

So any suggestions? Is the problem maybe on my end, or does Kinko's just need a better printer?

"300 DPI...it's not just a good idea"

One of those hard and fast rules of printing...you up the resolution, you up the quality...to an extent (we're not getting into the double-the-line-printing rules )

Usually when you Save For Web, your PSD automatically defaults to screen-res (as jpeg is a file format for web usage) and that's 72 DPI in this case. No good.

You can try saving as a jpeg without resolution loss, or try a different format without res loss and artifacting, such as Bitmaps, or tiff files. If your image resolution was low to begin with, then raising the res will just make it seem blurry, but it's a good lesson to learn for next time.



ICQ:# 10237808

Most Kinkos also have photoshop. but... I believe Dark has hit your problem on the head.

Cheers!

www.homestead.com/reitveld

DG is right, as usual. And the more ridiculously huge it is on screen the better it should print out, especially if it's full page. Remember, your monitor can only show you 72 dpi at most, so you need at least 300 dpi for any type of decent image quality.

That means that whatever image program you use to open and print the jpg should display it larger than the screen.

Also, if they have photoshop at kinkos, it would be a better idea to save the psd (if possible) and print it from photoshop directly. Or print the jpg from photoshop as well.

quote:

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I had to save it as a jpeg on a floppy, so I could take it to Kinko's to print out.

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Well, that will also be a problem, trying to save a high rez uncompressed image under 1.44 mb.

Do you have another portable/removeable media? zip disk? cd burner? Ask your school if perhaps they have a portable zip drive that you could borrow, plug it into your comp and then take the disk over to a printer. What if you saved it to your website if you have one, or your school's, and then download the file from there?

Whatever you do, you HAVE to get rid of those jaggies - because if you, as a student, can see them, any potential employer will definitely see them. (like a huge glaring neon sign screaming "DO NOT HIRE". )

Also, Kinkos is evil. really. Try to find another printer if possible.

sheesh... I so need a ZIP drive or a CD burner...

"They mostly come out at night. Mostly." - Newt, Aliens

hehe... of you are cheap like me, you can cut up the high rez into a bunch of 1 meg pieces and save them all to their own disk, go to kinkos, and use PS to put them back together... and you would then have a high rez print!

but then again... i have a cd burner...

Silence: and others. About monitor resolution.

I was under the impression (actually read it in one of my still packed books) that only Mac monitors ran at 72dpi where as PC/Windows based monitors ran at 96.

Yeah, Nojive, I assumed he had a Mac since most art schools usually use macs as the standard.

Macs run at the typographical standard of 72 dpi so it's easy to guage relative size from the screen since the pixels and point are about the same. 72 points in an inch, 72 pixels in an inch. Easy, no?

PCs, however, run at 96 dpi so objects displayed will be about 133% of their printed size.