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Improve the quality of printed iPhoto books
Authored by: MAC-Gyver on Jul 20, '05 10:15:51AM

While I haven't tried this (although I want to) I am a graphic designer and know a thing or two about printing images. Apple touts these books are being beautiful, so it surprised me to read this. If anything, it would make sense for the smaller books to have 150dpi (since they are smaller it wouldn't be as noticeable, and since the pictures are smaller they wouldn't need as many dpi to be quality). But if you are blowing up images to fill pages, you need as many dots per inch as possible!

I plan on ordered a book in the next day or so... I'm just debating whether or not I should chance it...



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Improve the quality of printed iPhoto books
Authored by: mflider on Jul 20, '05 10:57:07AM

Actually, if the pictures were smaller, a lower DPI would be more noticeable. Consider that if you use 300 dpi for an image that's 4 inches across, and 150 dpi for an image that's 2 inches across, the smaller image would have 1/4 the area but only 1/16 of the number of pixels!

In short, you'd be looking more closely at a smaller picture (possibly squinting), but could lean back a bit to see the larger picture. So it makes sense that one would want a larger DPI on smaller pictures -- for visual acuity in the book, and bandwidth constaints for Apple. I agree with the hint, though: 300 dpi is the minimum at which anyone would want to print their pictures.



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Improve the quality of printed iPhoto books
Authored by: jen729w on Jul 26, '05 08:43:18AM

The mathematical me won't let that lie... :-)

Think about it. An image 4 inches across (let's call it a 4x4 square) has 4 times the area of an image 2x2. Halving the width doesn't half the area; it's an inverse square relationship.

DPI, of course, stands for Dots Per Inch. Per -inch-. One inch, 300 dots. Two inches, 600 dots. Each inch has its own number of dots. It doesn't matter a damn, therefore, how many inches you have.

The confusion here may arise because a 1024x728 image printed at A4 size will have a certain number of dots per inch, and the same image printed at A5 (that's half A4, Americans) will have double the dots per inch. In this case, however, I'm specifying a fixed image size and a fixed paper size; not a DPI value.

Hope that makes sense. Maths is so beautiful. :-)

j.



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Improve the quality of printed iPhoto books
Authored by: dkitsov on Jul 21, '05 01:13:39AM

Well, I would want to have more detail in the smaller print as I am going to look at it from much closer distance then a big print.



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