Question ordering Prints

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Bamber1970

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Name
Jason
Edit My Images
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Hi Everyone
For the past few nights I have been reading up on print resizing etc as I want order a few prints online.
I have edited a picture in LR & exported & saved it in PS. The image size is 24" x 16" & 300dpi file is 20 + MB in size, on the screen the quality looks brilliant.
When I upload to DS Colour Labs it looks blurred & only exports to 240dpi.
What if anything am I doing wrong?
Thanks in advance.
 
OK, let's slow down just a little. You're throwing a lot of information around there, but it's not obvious to me what it actually means.

Firstly, you say your exported file is 24" x 16" and 300 dpi. Can you confirm (eg using file properties in Windows Explorer) that the image is 7200 x 4800 pixels?

Next, you say that on screen it looks brilliant. What are you looking at on screen? The whole image or just a portion of it? Most normal computer monitors can only display about 2 million pixels but your exported image should have about 35 million pixels. If you're looking at the whole image, it's effectively been shrunk so it's not surprising that it looks good. To see the actual quality properly you need to blow it up to 100% magnification, which probably means approximately 6 x 4 feet for the whole image. (Of course you'll only see a tiny portion of it on screen.)

Next, you say that when you upload it to DSCL it looks blurred. Again, what are you looking at? A print or an on-screen image? If it's on screen, how big is it? (And what software are you using to look at it?) If it's a print, how big is it?

Finally you say the image you uploaded to DSCL only exports to 240 dpi. What exactly do you mean by that? Did you make a print and if so what size was it? (At 240 dpi it should be 30" x 20".) Did you download the image file and if so what size was it in pixels? What does export" mean here?

If you can answer these questions, we'll start to have some understanding of what you've actually done. And then (and only then) we can look at what you might have done wrongly.
 
Thanks Stuart I thought I was well on the way to mastering this after all the YouTube videos I have watched.

In PS the image size is 6960x4250 290dpi but I have just noted that I'm only looking at it at 25%.

I have upload the picture to the DSCl site and selected the image size of 24x16 the image on the screen doesn't look sharp, I'm viewing the image on the upload page, around the outer edge it then says 240dpi - image quality good.

By saving image 24x16 in PS & selecting that image size in DCSl I thought the rest would take care of itself!

Thanks for time in replying to my post.
 
Bamber1970 said:
Thanks Stuart I thought I was well on the way to mastering this after all the YouTube videos I have watched.

In PS the image size is 6960x4250 290dpi but I have just noted that I'm only looking at it at 25%.

I have upload the picture to the DSCl site and selected the image size of 24x16 the image on the screen doesn't look sharp, I'm viewing the image on the upload page, around the outer edge it then says 240dpi - image quality good.

By saving image 24x16 in PS & selecting that image size in DCSl I thought the rest would take care of itself!

Thanks for time in replying to my post.
Click to expand...

I dunno why the two are showing different, unless the resolution is changing on export. 6960 / 24 = 290 PPI. To get 240 it must be 5760 pixels wide when you're uploading it?
 
I think I'm going to bite the bullet & get a print done to see how it turns out.
 
Last edited:
The lab software will show a low res thumbnail, hence it might look low res or poor colour
 
Bamber1970 said:
In PS the image size is 6960x4250 290dpi .... saving image 24x16 in PS ...
Click to expand...
There's something fundamentally wrong here. 6960x4250 is not the same shape as 24x16. It's more like 26x16. So if you force PS to save it as 24x16, you're distorting the shape.
 
StuartR thanks for your help I have gone back to the start & resaved & uploaded. Not sure if I have done something wrong or if it was a glitch computer/site but I now believe it looks as it it should. I'm going to take a gamble & get it printed. As I said at the start this is all new to me so steep learning curve. Thanks again.
 
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