Calling all photo gurus

[Ska]

So the other day I was going to get some pics printed, and took a CD into Wolf Camera (camera store chain around town). I was getting ready to print them, and then the girl working there said that since I had pulled them off a website, if I printed them they wouldn't look that good. She also said I should try to get the original files if I could, and that those would look a lot better.

Now I don't know jack about cameras, but why does that even matter? What's the advantage of getting the original file (which a guy in NC has and would be a huge pain to try and find), and why wouldn't it look good if I just used the pics I had already? Or was this girl just a cokehead?

[MC Teg]

No, she was right. When you're blowing up pictures, the higher the resolution of the photo (size of the file), the larger you can blow up the picture without losing any information (pixels). So if you blow up a medium size file, its not going to look as good as the original file size. How big of a print size do you need?

[Ska]

Not too big, I was thinking 4x6 or something.

[MC Teg]

In that case, I think you should be fine. Good looking size print should be around 640x480 or 1024x768 for a 4x6 print. I was assuming you were printing up something around 8x10.

[TireMeltingRSX]

cokewhore

[spyder5786]

Depends on the color space too. I don't know what wolf camera prints in, but you want to match the color space of your pics with their printers. (Whether it's adobeRGB, sRGB, or CMYK.

[Nikon1]

As Andy and Andrew have said, resolution is a key factor. Many people post photos at a resolution of 72 dpi to 120 dpi as it looks good on a monitor - but print resolution is ehhh. My advice is to try it - what's a 4 x 6 print cost, a buck or two?

If it looks good you're home free: If not . . .


Good luck!

[Slynky]

Combination:

As Ian said, for a 4x6, you should be looking at 1000+ pixels on the long side to have any quality. Let's do some math:

6 inches (no comments, guys) @ 200 DPI (dots per inch) would mean you need 1200 dots to have available. 200 should be OK for a 4 x 6. Personally, if it's my print, I never go below 240...staying at the standard of 300 most of the time.

So, you pull off an image that's 1200 x 800. That's going to be 200 DPI and give a respectable 4 x 6...BUT, you'll need to use a program to change the DPI. Not knowing what all Wolf will do for you, you might not need to do anything but if it were me, I'd use a program to change the DPI from screen resolution to print resolution.

Now, to confuse things, there are the multiple saves as a JPG which is a lossy compression algo. If it was saved a couple of times before it hit the internet, then you pull it off and change and save it again, it loses a bit of quality. Not hardly noticeable but...

And, as also mentioned, if it came off the screen, it was most likely RGB or s-RGB. Printing is handled with CYMK. A conversion is done (in your case, probably on the fly), so the colors won't come out just as you see them on the screen.

And that assumes your MONITOR is even calibrated correctly.

So, she gave you a good answer without going into a lot of detail. Kudos for her for trying to save you from what might have been a bad experience.

Finally, I'd find some other place than Wolf. Cheaper (and maybe better ) results can be had online.