Print Design TipsTips and Information About Printing

For non-professionals and especially those who are first timers in the field of print and design, there are so many acronyms and new jargon flying around which makes it very distracting at best and off-putting at worst.  Here is the very best business tip you are ever going to get – if you have a supplier loading you with jargon, make them explain what they are talking about or fire them!

Before you get to that drastic stage, here are some of the more commonly used acronyms and language used in the field of resolution.  Resolution is how clearly an image and text is presented from the original image to reproduction; a high resolution image will typically be capable of much better reproduction especially if the original is enlarged in your brochure or publication.  You may see some images look blurry in some publications and this is due to low resolution images being enlarged so much that you see the dots or pixels which make up the image and as we are now using some jargon (pixels) we’d better get you clued in!

Pixel

A pixel is the smallest data component of an image – you may see them as the dots on a computer screen (if they are large enough) or in a photograph especially in a newspaper.  Pixel is a combination of two words – “pix” (for picture) and “el” from element – picture element, the smallest building blocks of an image in printing and digital reproduction.

PPI – Pixels Per Inch

This is the number of pixels displayed in an image.  When you look at a digital image on your computer screen, that image is composed of pixels and the more pixels per inch that there are, the higher the resolution i.e. the picture looks more clearer and sharper.

When you are using PPI you must understand it is relating to the screen resolution and not the image resolution or the finished, printed reproduction.  Adobe Photoshop uses PPI but Corel Photo-Paint uses DPI just to add to the confusion which leads us neatly onto….

DPI – Dots Per Inch

DPI measures the printer resolution and refers to the dots of ink used by an image setter or other printer used to reproduce the text and images of your project.  This is a better measure than PPI because it relates directly to the finished article and not the representation on the computer screen which may look fantastic but let you down when printed off.

LPI – Lines Per Inch

This refers to how a printer creates the finished image and text on paper – it specifically refers to how a printer prints lines of halftone spots which recreates a continuous image.  The number of these lines per inch is the LPI – the more the better the reproduction – LPI is sometimes referred to as the line frequency or halftone resolution.

SPI – Samples Per Inch

SPI is the scanner and digital image resolution; a scanner actually takes portions of the original image to be scanned  and not the entire image (it is not a photograph for instance) and the more samples it takes, the greater the amount of the original image is recreated and this increases the resolution of the scanned image.  The higher the SPI then the greater the resolution produced.