Printing a family photo book? Don’t do THIS to your digital photos, please.
I wrote recently about the main reason so many images end up printing small in life story books: It’s because, quite simply, the digital files are too small. There are three main reasons this happens, and they are avoidable. Unfortunately, the only way to avoid them is to take some action BEFORE a photo is taken.
What if, however, you’ve got a bunch of photos that you simply must include in your printed book and the resolution is lower than needed? Well, they can often print at a small size and look quite good; and there are some tweaks that can be made to optimize print quality of smaller images, too—but these will increase print quality incrementally, not allow you to double the size of your pictures.
What about simply changing the resolution, you ask? Nooooooo—please don’t do that.
The biggest mistake you can make when printing digital photos
Do NOT manually change your image’s resolution.
Repeat: Do NOT increase your image’s resolution in a program such as Photoshop or Lightroom.
Why?
You can’t go in reverse, from a low-resolution image to a high-resolution image. Sure, you can type a higher resolution into your image editing software, technically adding pixels per inch—but those pixels are made up, imagined by the computer to fill in detail where none exists. It’s called resampling, and it’s decidedly bad for print. Simply put: Don’t increase your image’s resolution by resampling.
If you’d like to read a more thorough explanation of DPI, PPI, and resolution, I recommend checking out this thorough and clear post from a Boston-based design studio.
Generally speaking, if you are sending your files to a professional to design your book, always send the file with the highest DPI or PPI (which is most often also the biggest file in the bunch—i.e. 10MB as opposed to 30KB!).
You don’t want them to appear grainy or, even worse, pixelated.
This is an example of a fairly SMALL image that will NOT print well. You can see that at 72 pixels per inch (which is the optimal resolution for displaying on a computer screen, but not for printing) the image would be approximately 12x7 inches. In this Photoshop dialogue box, the option to resample is checked; if you were to increase resolution to 300 ppi here, the resampling would “fill in” pixels to theoretically increase the image’s resolution, but it will do so poorly—see a comparison below of how the image would look.
SMALL TO LARGE FILE SIZE: This is what the image looks like when we attempt to increase its resolution through resampling, as in the dialogue box above. As you can see, detail is poor, and there is a halo effect throughout.
LARGE FILE SIZE TO START: This is what the image looks like when it is scanned at a resolution of 300 ppi instead of the 72 shown above. As you can see, a higher-quality scan yields a higher-quality digital original that WILL print beautifully.
Most of the advice here and above is sufficient for most people to produce gorgeous, high-quality photo books and prints.
Professionals (like me!) who optimize your images for books and other high-quality output will go even further to not only ensure optimal printing results, but to enhance images for visual appeal. We do things such as:
calibrate our monitors so the screen images match the printer specs as closely as possible
consider paper texture and tone when optimizing images for print
extend photos so they have enough bleed to print as full-page images without cropping anything out
retouch imperfections or distracting background noise
sharpen images adequately (but not too much) for print; photographer Christian Hoiberg offers a course called “Ultimate Sharpening Workflow for Fine Art Printing” if you are interested in learning more yourself.
scan print images at high resolution so they can be significantly enlarged with no quality degradation
digitally “repair” rips, stains, and yellowing on old photos
Much can be done to ensure that your precious photos print beautifully in memory books and elsewhere, and I am always thrilled to be the expert on your journey. Just remember, if you go the DIY route: DO NOT manually increase your digital photo’s resolution if you want it to print well…please.