Hi
What are the usual delivery DPI's for JPEG (viewing) and TIF(printing) for a client? I'm thinking JPEG at 240. Is this overkill OR can they use this for both printing and viewing? All thoughts are very much appreciated.
Thank You
cwebster is correct. Delivering files at 72 0r 300 ppi is a convenience for the client. I usually deliver 72 ppi files for on-line or viewing and 300 for images going to print.
Actually its PPI — pixels per inch. DPI is a acronym that pre-dates digital which refers to "dots per inch" and refers to the spacing of hard dot offset printed halftones.
PPI and output size is a relative thing. Thus the way to control what a client can do with the file is to control the physical pixel dimensions of the file you give them, not the ppi setting in the file.
If you give a client a file with the physical dimensions of 600 x 900 it will reproduce at various sizes depending on how they display or print it. On a monitor with 72 pixel per inch resolution the size of the image will be 600/72 x 900/72 = 8.3 x 12.5 inch screen image. If they try to print at Costo they will get either a very sharp 600/300 x 900/300 = 2 x 3 inch print or a resampled larger print.
So if all you want them to do is review the files you shot to pick the ones for retouching and printing then you'd want to give them a small file they can display at a reasonable size on screen but not print decently at any usage size.
If you are selling them finished files with a license to print up to certain size, then as a general rule of thumb you might want to resize the file to the largest print size x 300. For example if you are only licensing them to print 8 x 12 prints you'd size the file to 8 x 300 by 12 x 300 = 2400 x 3600 pixels. That will not prevent them from printing larger by using lower output resolution or resampling in Photoshop but that will result in lower quality.
If you don't really care what they do with the file then just give them a copy at the same pixel dimensions that the camera produced. That will allow them to resize / crop / sharpen.
HC110 wrote:
Hi
What are the usual delivery DPI's for JPEG (viewing) and TIF(printing) for a client? I'm thinking JPEG at 240. Is this overkill OR can they use this for both printing and viewing? All thoughts are very much appreciated.
Thank You
DPI doesn't mean anything unless you are printing. Changing the DPI on a web resolution picture doesn't do anything.
You'd be better off giving them smaller pixel dimension pictures for online viewing, and giving them higher pixel dimension files for printing.
Talk pixels, not dpi or ppi. You don't need to give them two images. Providing an image larger than 2400x3000 set to 300dpi in .jpg format is enough. You could also provide a smaller pixel size at, say 400x600 or something if you want to be nice.
