1st time on-line printing help please

Shoreline

Shoreline

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Name
Martin
Edit My Images
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Hello, I have read about 10 different explanations of how to do this but I still cannot find a definitive answer that I can understand so I'm posting this in desparation hoping that someone can set me straight.

My 7D puts out an image measuring 5184 x 3456 pixels on current settings.

Let's say I want to get the highest quality print I can at around A4 size using DS Colour Labs.

Their website says I need to resize my file to 3510 x 2475 @ 300dpi for A4

I don't have Photoshop or Lightroom yet, I just have Paint.net. The dialogue box for resizing images looks like this:

e0fa4689.jpg


So the question is: do I simply reduce the pixel dimensions from 5184 x 3456 to 3510 x 2475 and ignore the 'Resolution' box - where it says 72 pixels/inch? Or do I have to alter that as well before I can send them the file?

I know this subject gets a lot of enquiries but I can't say I'm surprised given the amount of conflicting adivce there seems to be out there.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Martin
 
The 'Resolution' box in your dialogue box is irrelevant here. It might tell your own printer how big to print the image, it might not. The online printer will ignore it and use the setting its own printers use, which is 300 dpi.
The online printer will print at 300 dots per inch. That's a fixed value. So your existing image's long side at 5184 pixels will print out at 5184(pixels) divided by 300(dots per inch) which makes 17.28 inches. An A4 image's long side is 11.7 inches. The online printer will print whatever data you give it at 300 dpi, you want the long side to be 11.7 inches, and each of those inches needs 300 pixels of data. 11.7 x 300 makes 3510 pixels.

Resize your images so the long side is 3150 pixels and make sure the 'Maintain aspect ratio' box is ticked. They will then return from the print shop at A4 size.
 
Thank you very much for that quick and helpful reply Stratman. Much appreciated. All I need to do now is pluck up the courage to post some pics in the Bird section.

Re cropping; I have to crop all my images quite severly because I still can't get close enough to the birds so I rarely start out with a full-size image but I just wanted to know what, exactly, DS colour labs required. I will need to tidy up my dimensions / aspect ratios to match paper sizes but that's not a problem. It was just the whole "PPI vs DPI" thing that was driving me nuts.

Thanks again
 
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Just one thing I spotted in your reply; don't change the aspect ratio if you resize. If you do everything will print either 'tall and thin' or 'short and fat'.

It's OK to change it when cropping, but not when resizing.
 
Yep, got that, thanks :thumbs:

The problem is that when I've been cropping my original files I've been using the select tool to just draw a freehand rectangle encompasing the portion of the image that I want; ie I haven't been paying any attention to dimensions or ratios because I've only been viewing on screen. Of course, this means that my images are all sorts of different sizes and ratios now, which is a bit awkward for printing but I presume can either trim them up to match paper sizes or I can just resize to the longest edge and let there be some white space on the print if the short edge isn't the same size as the paper?

Thanks again for you help with this.
 
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