The Business Card Blog

Choosing a suitable image for your printing job entails more than simply using a photo that looks good on your screen. Providing your designer with images of sufficient resolution will result in a faster turnaround for your artwork setup, and highest quality print results.

High resolution images suitable for printing hold far more data than screen or web quality images, so a high resolution image file will be far larger in file size than it’s low resolution equivalent.

As an example, a web quality photo 200x100px, approximately 7×3.5cm, will be 72 dpi and only 60kb in file size. If this image is to be printed on a brochure at 7×3.5cm size, it needs to be 300dpi and the file size will be around 1,000kb (1mb).

The sample below shows how a low resolution image will appear in print, compared to a high resolution image.

72 dpi resolution – 60kb file size	300dpi resolution – 1,000kb (1mb) file size

For the purpose of providing images for your job, the first step is to ensure your original image has sufficent resolution to print at high quality on the printing press. If you’re using a digital camera, put the quality setting on “high” or “best”. As long as the camera is reasonable quality, using this setting should result in a high resolution image file. Give your designer the image file just as it is off the camera, with no cropping, resizing or editing.

If you’ll be using a professional photographer, check before they start that they’ll be able to provide large, print quality images with sufficient resolution at the intended print size. As a general rule, ask them to shoot at the highest possible resolution as your print designer can easily resize them to smaller sizes as required.

If you’re downloading stock images, choose the appropriate size for your print job based on the final size of the image. If the photo is to be used on a smaller item like a bookmark or small magazine ad, the “medium” size image should be sufficient. If the final image will be any larger than that, you’ll need either “large” or “extra large”.

Need help? Just ask us for advice before buying stock photos so we can help you choose the best option.