I print my fine art prints with Image Print, an excellent RIP.\u00a0 And I print on an Epson 4800.\u00a0 Image Print gives you the option of printing at 180 or 360 ppi.\u00a0 I’ve printed a lot of great looking, rather large\u00a0photographs at 180 ppi.\u00a0 A lot of my friends are shocked.\u00a0 They say I’m compromising the quality of the print.\u00a0 But no matter how close I scrutinize the prints I really can’t see any difference.<\/p>\n
Enter Genuine Fractals.\u00a0 Genuine Fractals really objects if you try to resize an image to 180 ppi.\u00a0 The smallest it is comfortable going is 240.\u00a0 To get it to accept 180 ppi I have to fake it out.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the fact that it defaults ot 240 raises all sorts of questions.\u00a0 What if I resize at 240 ppi and print at 180 or 360?\u00a0 For that matter, is there a difference between 180 and 360.\u00a0 So the other day I was printing some 16X24 images and decided it was time to finally ran a test.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I created three files at 180, 240 and 360 ppi using Genuine Fractals of course.\u00a0 On the monitor there really wasn’t a lot of difference as far as sharpness goes.\u00a0 (My camera for this was my trusty Canon 10D, all 6 M pixels.)\u00a0 But there was a discernible difference to the colors.\u00a0 The 360 had the richest colors, especially reds.\u00a0 The 180 was next in richness and the 240 was the least rich.\u00a0 Interesting.<\/p>\n
So I printed them on Epson Enhanced Matte paper.\u00a0 The 180 printed at 180, 240 printed at 180 and 240, and\u00a0 360 were virtually indistinguishable.\u00a0 But the 360 printed at 380 indeed had richer colors, especially the reds.<\/p>\n
So what’s going on?\u00a0 I don’t have a clue.\u00a0 It could be one of a number of things but\u00a0I suppose I would first suspect Genuine Fractals since that was the last thing that touched the file – well, nearly the last thing. The absolute last thing that touched the file was the\u00a0Photokit output sharpener tuned for the ppi of the file.<\/p>\n
So if I want richer colors I guess I print at 360 ppi.\u00a0 But is the extra richness worth files twice the size of the 180’s?\u00a0 I’m not sure.\u00a0 You have to compare the prints side by side and look pretty closely to see the difference.\u00a0 I doubt a casual observer would notice it.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, I like to\u00a0take that extra step to make my photographs the best they can possibly be so it looks like I’ll standardize on 360 from now on.<\/p>\n
(1344)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I print my fine art prints with Image Print, an excellent RIP.\u00a0 And I print on an Epson 4800.\u00a0 Image Print gives you the option of printing at 180 or 360 ppi.\u00a0 I’ve printed a lot of great looking, rather large\u00a0photographs at 180 ppi.\u00a0 A lot of my friends are shocked.\u00a0 They say I’m compromising … Continue reading “180 or 360 ppi?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,4,6],"tags":[205,91,204],"class_list":["post-321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-how-to-articles","category-journal","tag-fine-art-prints","tag-genuine-fractals","tag-image-print"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Nl7-5b","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":329,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions\/329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ralphnordstromphotography.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}