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Improve the quality of printed iPhoto books
Authored by: switcha on Jul 20, '05 11:16:53AM

While you're correct about line screen (for which you should usually supply 1.5 times the LPI in the DPI of your image for best result and most efficient processing in the RIP), the Apple books are printed digitally.

And ink jet or dye-sub process keeps the whole process in the DPI realm from soup to nuts, as images aren't broken into dot screens as they are with lithography.

The real problem is that most people don't resize their raw camera images to a desired DPI and then place them (doing any scaling they might wish to do), so they don't know what their final, effective DPI really is. If your image comes off your camera as reading "72 dpi at 20 inches" and you scale it down 50% to fit a page in your book, you've only doubled the effective dpi to 144. At 5 inches wide, you'd have quadrupled it, bringing the image to a respectable 288, which would be fine for a nice ink-jet image.

The only reason 300 exists as a very standard resolution is that the bulk of offset lithography is done in in the neighborhood of 150 line screen, and a lot of people have latched onto the theory of "double the LPI for the DPI", when 1.5 X yields as good a result. For digital imaging, I've found that once you're over 220 or so, the quality starts do depend much more on the output device than the resolution of the image. Of course, there are always exceptions.



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