Does PPI affect how the image looks on screen?

Jonzilla

Jonzilla

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As the title says. I am getting a bit confused by the whole exporting from photoshop.

Does having a higher ppi affect how the image looks on screen or on the web?

What I have been doing is saving as jpeg and then selecting highest quality but then I read somewhere that having a higher ppi increases the image quality.

Is this true or is PPI just about printing?

Also when exporting from photoshop is there any other way to get higher quality?
 
PPI or DPI is just setting the document size for print.. nothing more. I've no idea where the "72dpi for screen" rule came from... but it's nonsense.

If I had a picture 100 pixels across, and set it's PPI to 100, then it would print one inch across. If I set it to 1PPI, then it would print 100 inches across. Both appear the same size on the screen because both are still 100 pixels across.
 
Steve.Ledger said:
Macs use 72dpi and Windows use 96dpi screen scaling. Has nothing to do with the video system or printing, was related to fonts.
Click to expand...

Macs *used* to use 72 ppi. Back in the 80s or 90s, if you bought a Mac Plus or an Apple 14" or 17" monitor, you could scale off the screen with a ruler and get a reasonably accurate dimension. 72dpi was also the resolution of the ImageWriter dot matrix printers that Apple sold at the time, which gave a 1:1 correspondence between screen and printer.
 
Steve.Ledger said:
Macs use 72dpi and Windows use 96dpi screen scaling. Has nothing to do with the video system or printing, was related to fonts.

Here's a great article for the OP to read
► http://www.scantips.com/no72dpi.html
Click to expand...

Irrelevant.. although interesting :) You can set the DPI of an image to whatever you want, and it will display the same size on your screen. Its pixel resolution determines that... nothing else. The way modern OSs render fonts makes this all archaic nonsense now.

My monitor is well over 100 dpi, so even Windows default scaling doesn't give accurate sizes representations of print size. If anyone wants to ensure that print sizes are accurately scaled to their monitor resolution, I write about it here..... http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/photoshop-print-preview-size.442755/
 
Last edited:
Pookeyhead said:
Irrelevant.. although interesting :) You can set the DPI of an image to whatever you want, and it will display the same size on your screen. Its pixel resolution determines that... nothing else. The way modern OSs render fonts makes this all archaic nonsense now.
Click to expand...
Errr.. That's EXACTLY what the article is trying to get people to understand. Maybe you didn't read it all? Dunno. But that's the point.
 
Steve.Ledger said:
Errr.. That's EXACTLY what the article is trying to get people to understand. Maybe you didn't read it all? Dunno. But that's the point.
Click to expand...

I meant the whole 72 or 96dpi thing is irrelevant... meaning the actual numbers... as it's unlikely that's actually the resolution of your screen anyway.
 
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