Printing Your Digital Crafting Projects

There has always been a lot of discussion about dpi (dots per inch, or ppi, points per inch, which I found out are not interchangeable) in the digital scrapbooking world–which is the best for optimum printing? 200 dpi, 300 dpi? Your question might be “Why should I care?”? We’ll talk about that in a minute.

The industry standard has pretty much been set at 300 dpi as that is what manufacturers and magazines use to make products or publish pictures.?? Previously, I would create printable craft projects for my customers at 300 dpi because of this standard.? There were drawbacks however, like file sizes that were a bit large, and hard for people dial up connections to download.?

I began to experiment with lower dpi printables and after?several hundred printings on both ink jet and laser printers?at 300 dpi, 200 dpi and 150 dpi, determined that 150 dpi is more than enough to print digital craft projects and achieve an excellent print quality.?? You cannot tell the difference between the three just looking at them. A note to the positive about 300 dpi images: they?are nice for resizing.? They are fairly large, and can be scaled without loss of image quality to smaller sizes.? They can even be scaled up a bit without loss of image quality.

So what does this mean to you, and why should you care? Ken Watson discusses all of this at length in a very easy to read and understand series of articles at his website, All About Digital Photos.? Of particular interest to me were the articles “The Myth of DPI” and “What Magazines/Printers Really Want“.? I know I gained an education from reading these articles and stopped worrying so much about “industry standards”.? If a magazine asks for a particular dpi, file size? or size in inches, of course I will comply as I would like my work published.? However in the day to day creation of my printable craft projects for consumers, I have found something that works for everyone in the use of 150 dpi…high quality products that download easily and print beautifully.

Until next time,

S.