Printing DAZ rendered images for magazine?

amyw12

I have a question about printing images.

These images are going to be published in a magazine so I must convert them to 300 ppi, their current scale in pixels is approx 2700 x 2800. They are DAZ renders that I've edited in Photoshop and saved in .PNG format. Their dimensions are 73 cm x 74 cm.

When I go to Photoshop and change the resolution (ppi) to 300 without resampling, their dimensions go down to 23 cm x 24 cm. But when I check the scale in pixels it's still the same.

I don't understand if this will affect quality or not, does anyone know? I would also love to know if 23 cm x 24 cm is enough for a standard sized magazine - note that my artwork is not meant to take up an entire page or anything like that. 

Any help appreciated. Thank you

Fishtales

You need to multiply the printed size by 300 to get the render size. The render size you have just now will only give you a print size up to 9 inches by 6 inches (2700/300 =9, 2800/300=6) if you want it bigger you need more pixels e.g for an A4 sheet which is 210x297 Millimetres or 8.27x11.69 inches you need to render to at least 2481x3588 pixels which is usually rounded to 2500x3600 pixels.

Dim Reaper

It can be confusing because on a monitor it's the resolution of the image that is most important and that's what most of us work with most of the time.  If someone was using a DTP program, they would import the image, resize it on the page and if it does not look pixellated they would use it.  If it did look pixellated, they would look for a larger resolution image.  But for commercial level printing the image has to be in the correct print resolution.  The dpi/ppi of an image is simply information that can be read by the printer device on how to print the image.  It does not affect the number of pixels in the image.

I find it easier in photoshop to change over to inches rather than cm when looking at print sizes and dpi as it makes the conversion in your head much easier.  Imagine if you had an image that was 600 pixels by 300 pixels.  If you choose to print it at 300dpi, then it will print at 2 inches x 1 inch.  If you take that same image and print it at 100dpi, then it will print at 6 inches x 3 inches - but at a lower quality.  To go to an extreme with this, imagine that you then printed the same image at 1dpi - your printed image would be 600 inches x 300 inches, but each pixel of the image would be an inch square.

In every case above, the image was still 600x300 pixels.  In terms of printing, the dpi is important in relation to how the image is being looked at.  A magazine is generally read from a couple of feet away, which is why 300dpi is needed.  A billboard read from 100 feet away could have a much lower dpi and still be fine.

I'm sure that someone wrote a great guide to this here on the Daz forums a while back, but the search function isn't great, so here are some links to resources that might help further:

https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=282942&p=1888163

https://www.mixedmediacreations.com/dpi-guide-photo-big-enough/

https://www.iprintfromhome.com/mso/understandingdpi.pdf

 

I hope that the above helps, and good luck with your image.