Hi there. In this video,
we're going to look at what image resolution is, or DPI,
or PPI, effective PPI,
basically it comes down to the quality of your images.
Let's go and do that.
Image resolution might have come up in your world before and you might be like,
"I can understand it, maybe I don't."
Maybe you've never heard of it.
Let's have a quick little look at what it is.
Resolution is basically the quality of an image.
I'm going to click on this background image here and I'm going to go to my "Links panel."
If you can't see Links, go to "Window" and down to "Links."
What we're going to do is,
you might be able to see it already,
but I don't have mine activated.
See this little area here says "Show/Hide Link Information."
I'm going to make mine go up a little bit higher just so
I can see a bit more of this link information.
You can do it little down, you can make it
bigger and it just gives you information about the image.
There's the name, it's a JPEG,
it's on page one, it's RGB.
What we're really looking for is the major one,
it's the effective PPI.
PPI is an acronym for pixels per inch.
If you've ever heard of DPI or dots per inch,
it's exactly the same thing,
just a new way of explaining it,
pixels instead of dots.
We've got targets to hit.
The effective PPI maximum should be
about 300 and that's going to give you amazingly beautiful,
crisp, clear image when we print it and the lowest that we can go is variable.
It comes down to what its purposes.
If this is going to be printed commercially through
an offset printer and then put out in our display case,
at our showroom, then we want it to be as close to 300 or above.
You can have 1200 and that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with that. Above is good.
Below is when it starts getting into the gray area.
So 300 is the target.
It's totally just a made-up number that looks really good.
Some people use it like some "carved-in-stone-can-never-be-changed" number, but really,
if you're close to 300 like this one here,
this is 291, I would not care.
There's probably prepress people that do that might be going a red color now.
But if we're all honest,
we've all printed stuff below quality and nobody has noticed the difference.
It's how low can you go.
What really happens is,
it's depending on how big you've stretched this image.
This image is, you can see it's actual PPI is 300,
so whether it's 300 DPI image or PPI image,
but I had to stretch a little bit bigger to cover the bleed,
so I just made it just a teensy bit bigger.
It reached over this blade here.
Let's look at an example that won't work.
I'm going to delete this guy in the background temporarily.
I'm going to go to "File" "Place."
I've got an example in O3 newsletter,
grab that one and let's go to "Image resolution" example.
I'm going to bring it through and I'm going to bring it in,
I just click it once and that has come in.
It says it is 72, which is going to commercial printer.
It's not going to work,
so it needs to be at least 300,
but it looks okay on screen.
If you were going out to a screen,
as in it's going to be emailed or downloadable from your website,
72 is just a fine old size.
I'd like it to be a little bit higher,
but the minimum is 72 to look okay on most screens.
On a retina screen like this MacBook Pro that I've got in front of me,
it'll look a little bit pants,
but I've got to stop using the word pants.
It's UK slang for bad,
that pants, not bad anyway.
Anyway, back to resolution.
It is 72 dots per inch or PPI, pixels per inch.
It's going to work for screen,
but it's not going to wait for print,
but let's just make it bigger.
I want to use it for the whole cover, so I'm going to make it quite big.
I'm going to make it nice and big so it covers the bleed,
I'm going to trim it up there and it's looking okay.
It looks fine on my screen now,
it might look okay on your video,
but it will print really badly.
You can see if I select on the effective PPI is 300 now,
why is it changing?
It's because I'm scaling it out.
Watch they effective PPI as I keep scaling it up,
scale it up, they go, it's 28.
It's stretching those little pixels because if we zoom right in,
it's actually made up of little squares.
That's what resolution is,
or pixels per inch.
This is a pixel and how many pixels are in an inch at the moment is only 28 in that inch.
You need a lot more dense pixels for this to work.
Zoom out and you can start to see,
now it's looking a little bit ready around the outside, pants even.
The main thing to look at is,
don't worry about the quality of the image that came in first,
back in the days of your,
you had to make sure everything was 300 PPI before it came in.
What you can do now is you just looking at effective PPI,
ignore this number here, what it is here.
If this is going out to commercial print,
this is so far from 300 that it's not going to work at all.
Now, what are the boundaries?
Say I do want to use this commercially,
I'm going to scale it down.
You can see 78 is still too little.
If I want to use this in commercial print and I want to use it at 300 dpi,
you can see I'm getting there, 138,
might move this across so you can see it closer.
Getting smaller, 227, 312. Close to it.
That now is the right resolution to be printed.
Unfortunately, it's teeny-tiny.
Okay, so if you're downloading images from the Internet,
you just got to make sure they're really big so you can lease when you scale them down,
you get close to 300.
How low can you go?
Now, this is total personal preference.
Now, the rule is 300.
But I know if it's a good quality image from a stock library site,
you can get down to about 180,
150 if you're really sneaky and it will print fine.
I probably wouldn't do this for the front cover
because it's such an important part of this document.
But say it's an image that's on Page 2 and it's
just a small image and the resolution is about 180,
nobody will notice. Again, it really depends.
If you're trying to sell Bentley and you've got
some low-quality images that are just slightly off,
I'd be looking for 300 and above for resolution.
But in the general day-to-day world,
180 works just fine for me.
To recap, if you're working on screens,
that means it's going out via digital means.
It's going to be emailed or via downloaded from our website,
72 is the minimum.
A lot different because screens deal with
resolution a whole lot better than when it's printed physically.
If that's the case, I can have this all the way up at 54, not quite there,
but we're getting close,
59, come on, Dan, you can do it.
71, 72, that is fine if is it's physical size,
that's going to be a digital download.
In summary, just make sure your effective PPI is between 72 and 300,
depending on its purpose.