Hello! I’m hoping someone may have a solution to this problem. When taking photos with a digital camera, you end up with, for example, in image that is 1600x1200 at 72 dpi. I want to print this photo out at 4x5 inches (at say 300 dpi), but the image is 20x16 images. So I go into photoshop, and enlarge the image to 300dpi from 72, and then shrink the image down to 4x5 inches. I find this to be a very ineffecient method. Isn’t there an easy way to just change the dpi, and have the print size adjust accordingly?
Thanks!
That’s an issue with Photoshop – when you change the DPI, it changes the height/width as well. Even so, Photoshop should let you change the resolution and the size of the image in the same dialog box. Just type in the new resolution, then type in the desired size, and click “Okay”.
Welcome to Photoshop… using it can often be like swatting a fly with a Buick. Its incredibly powerful, but sometimes the easiest things require more hoop-jumping than the erstwhile Siegfried and Roy show.
What you need to do is get comfy with the Image>Image Size menu. When you change the resolution, uncheck the “resample image” box. This will link the dimensions and resolution to each other.
Again, the folks at Adobe give you great tools, and really listen to the consumers and give them what they want, but sometimes you have to slog through a lot of intermediate steps to do what seems like a fairly simple action. Once you get used to using the keyboard shortcuts, you’ll find yourself flying through all those menus without even looking, if that’s any consolation.
Montresor is right–it’s as simple as unchecking the “resample image” box. Put in the DPI you like, and see how the inches change to compensate. Or you can just put in the inches you like, and see how many DPI that will get you. If it’s too high, you can later re-check the “resample image” box, change the size of the image, and then use the “Unsharp Mask” filter to sharpen up the resampled image.
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Increasing resolution from 72dpi to 300dpi basically does nothing, because the information just isn’t there to begin with.
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It will be completely useless if you do not use “resample image.”
Not if you’re printing.
If you printed something at 72 dpi, and it was 1600 x 1200 resolution, it would come out to be 22.2 (repeating) inches by 16.6 (repeating) inches. Of course, if your printer can’t handle that size of paper, it’ll print on multiple sheets, and they’ll all be blurry. This is because the 72 dpi instructs your printer to print 72 “dots” per inch.
Increasing the 72 dpi to a sharper-for-paper 300 dpi yields a 5.3 (repeating) by 4 inch image, which will print crisply (or at least as crisply as it looks on the screen).
Increasing resolution as per your comment WITH ‘RESAMPLE IMAGE’ on indeed creates (or tries to create) new information, and thus usually yields a blurry image. Turning resample image on tells Photoshop to create new information to expand the picture (or discard information to compress it), while leaving resample off tells the program to compress ALL the data into a smaller space (for smaller dimensions/larger dpi) or to expand the information (but not create new) into a bigger space (for bigger dimensions/smaller dpi).
Consider, if this were an original image:
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If we increase the dpi OR decrease the image size while leaving “resample image” off, we might get an image a little like this:
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Decreasing dpi or increasing image size with “resample image” still off might give us:
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If we now turn “resample image” on and increase image size, we might get:
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Where the green dots are new information that wasn’t present in the original file.
I think.