YL opened this issue on Dec 02, 2002 ยท 16 posts
MightyPete posted Tue, 03 December 2002 at 6:43 PM
To get the highest quality printing possible is to try to print 1 to 1 that's the best you can get. So ever pixel on the screen you get one dot on the paper or drop of ink for that matter. So brings up the math. If you want to print at 600 dpi ( dot per inch ) you need 600 dots per inch on your monitor to get it 1 to 1. Well monitors only display 72 dots per inch usually so you need really huge files to print well. Now this has been brought up before that Vue has this curious setting DPI well on really close inspection it does NOTHING ! It simply instructs your computer printer to fake all the missing data like take a sting of 72 dots in a row and convert it to 300 dots on the fly. You can't get something for nothing so if you want really high quality you have to render to the size your going to print it at so it's 1 to 1. Or as close to it as you can. So at 300 DPI you need to render a picture 3000 wide just to get it to print 10 inches ! Now If I want to do a really nice job I print them at 1200 DPI the files are huge hundreds of megs for a single file. It BLOWS a photo away ! I don't render at 1200 DPI I fake it. I render it at say 600 DPI then I drag it into Photoshop and resize it so it will print at 1200 DPI then I usually do a bit of smoothing so that the data is actually there. I've printed little pictures 2400 dpi they are like you never seen before perfect tiny little pictures. Like perfect but it takes a lot of power and even printing them takes even for small ones a lot of time. I usually don't keep the big files I just print then delete. There too big to keep some will not even fit on a cd. I just keep the source files. There is tons of threads here on this topic on this forum all ready. You should look around and do some reading about it. Do a search.