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The Battle of Print Images vs. Web Images. One of the most common questions designers ever get asked is: Can’t you just cut and paste an image from the web and put it in our brochure? To make a long story short: No. To make the short story a little more dramatic: Absolutely not and if anyone tells you that you can, flee to the hills. Here’s why – Images, whether on a website, a brochure, or your television screen, consist entirely of miniscule boxes of a colour. In the print, design and film industry, these boxes are commonly referred to as, and measured in, ‘ppi’ (pixels per inch) or ‘dpi’ (dots per inch). The more pixels per inch, the sharper the image quality and the higher the resolution. To put it another way, more accurate color and sharpness results when more pixel information is supplied. Thus, we have our web-to-print problem. Graphics that are built to be viewed online need to load quickly (often in a matter of seconds) so the standard resolution for these kinds of images is 72dpi. Printed material, on the other hand, isn’t affected by loading times and so much higher resolutions can be used, ensuring that poster you’re looking at looks sharp and crisp and not blurry and mottled. For anything that’s printed on an offset printer (as opposed to a laser jet), the minimum dpi is 266 (the general rule of thumb being 300). Is it not then simply a matter changing the resolution? Unless you’re decreasing the pixels per inch, unfortunately not. No one can ‘add’ pixels in such a way that the image remains flawless and true to the original. For example, try this little exercise: Download an image from a website and use a desktop publishing program (Word, etc.) to enlarge this image by 400%. Notice what happens to the image? Doesn't look too hot, does it. Exactly the same thing happens when a web-based image (72dpi) is converted into a print-ready image (300dpi) and not even the best designer in the world can do anything about it. Below is a sample of the differences in quality when a 72 dpi image is converted into a 300dpi image: Web Image - 72dpi Print Image - 300dpi So now you know just what to say if a colleague ever dares ask, “Can’t we just cut and paste an image from the web and put it in our brochure...?" |
