ratcreature: RatCreature at the drawing board. (drawing)
RatCreature ([personal profile] ratcreature) wrote2007-02-24 06:40 pm
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question about printing digital art...

I don't own a color printer myself, so usually I don't print any digital art, but just create it for viewing on screen, i.e. I usually scan the pencil sketch at 300dpi, color it in GIMP, and then when it's finished I merge the layers and resize it so that it's a convenient, smaller size for looking at it on the usual 72dpi screen, which has the advantage to make it look better and conceal errors.

But I suspect printing art at 300dpi would still look rather crappy, so I wanted to ask those of you who print their digital art (I'm mostly thinking of digital drawings, I'm not sure whether it is different for photos) which resolution gives a decent result. I'm not thinking of professional printing quality, like graphic designers for print media would need, because I don't own a high end computer and working with huge graphic files with multiple layers in a very high resolution is cumbersome with my hardware limitations, which is why I usually settle for 300dpi, but just a good, clean look if you printed the drawing at the size of the original pencils. Would 600dpi be enough if I wanted to print a drawing later on, or does the resolution need to be even higher? At which resolution do you print your art?

dpi

[identity profile] annexensen.livejournal.com 2007-02-24 08:46 pm (UTC)(link)
I work in printing and people ususally make these two mistakes---Either they give us digital files where they res'd up a lo res image - (this of course doesnt improve the quality) or they give us a file with a huge dpi. Any file at (one to one) 300 dpi is optimum. That is what we rip the files at anyways to they would be interpolated to 300 dpi. Actually we accept 220 dpi and up for printing.