PANdaRUS opened this issue on Aug 20, 1999 ยท 13 posts
Floydd posted Fri, 20 August 1999 at 8:25 PM
Foxhollow is right - with one notable exception. An image file is composed of pixels and only pixels. DPI and image size in INCHES-CM-PICAS-CUBITS or whatever, are irrelevant numbers unless you choose to leave an electronic display environment and actually print the file on paper. At this point you DO have to tell a printer how much paper to spread the file's finite number of pixels across. I believe that virtually all image file formats merely store the number of HxV pixels with no reference to this additional printer info. The single oddball exception to this seems to be the PICT file format, which does actually attach this printer info onto the image file and tries to incorporate this info to approximate the printed image size while displaying it on screen. Not being a PhotoShop user, (Corel) I only recently discovered this exception, and was therefore perplexed why all the PhotoShop users were so hung up on DPI while working in an electronic display environment. Bottom line in Poser is, if you need either higher DPI or a larger print size, just render a higher HxV pixel count in a new window. Then tell your printer how much paper to use (by setting either DPI or physical image size) when you get ready to print it. If you want to print an 8x10 inch image at 300 DPI then, regardless of what file format you are using, you must render your image at (8x300)H by (10x300)V or 2400x3000 pixels.