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A photo printed at 72dpi, a common
web resolution, will not print clearly.
A photo printed at 300dpi will
be clear and crisp.
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If you are scanning images from photographs for your
printing project, it is better to save them in either TIFF or
EPS format. These image formats will preserve the color and sharpness
of your pictures.
File formats like GIF or
JPG compress the pictures color and pixel resolution and this can cause
color shifts and blurriness. Since jpg and gif are the most predominant
image formats on the web, it follows that it's not a good idea to simply
lift an image from someone's website and use it in your layout.
You should scan your images using a resolution of 300dpi at the final
dimensions you intend to use them so that your colors will look smooth,
and hard objects will look sharp. In other words don't scan at 300dpi
and then enlarge the picture by 200% in your layout program! This is
another reason why you should not use images that are lifted from websites;
they are probably only 72dpi in resolution and will look very blurry
if printed on a printing press.
If you are using pictures from your digital camera, they
will work just fine if they are jpgs; the quality of jpg images from
digital cameras seems to be much better than jpgs that are used on
the web. You must do the math to make sure that it is high enough in
pixel resolution though. For instance, if your camera puts out a typical
image of 1280 x 960 pixels at 72dpi you get about 17" x 13" of
photograph (at 72dpi); this is the same amount of detail as an image
which is 4" x 3" at 300dpi so it's safe to reduce or enlarge
that image up to about 4" x 3" in dimension.
Read more pre-press printing
tips...
