What DPI do you render your Poser images at? I usually do mine at 300dpi 2000x2000. I don't seem to loose as much detail when I shrink it . Is there a big difference between rendering at say 72dpi 4000x4000 or 300dpi 1000x1000. Hugz Joan

I usually do 600dpi for print, but only 72dpi for basic test renders. I use Poser mostly for animation, so I use a 16:9 size ratio - 768x432. When doing final renders, I'll bump it up to 300dpi for the animations. I've recently discovered, thanks to the awesome tutorials on Daz' Arcana site, that the map size of the lights makes a difference, however subtle. It just gives it extra depth. As for the difference between those resolutions, I'd say that yes, 300dpi is going to look better - you're getting more detail per inch. Resolution could definitely fill a small tome, and I'm no expert. But 300dpi should always be better quality than 72. --silver

Really DPI is irrelevent, unless you are specifing the size of an image for print. What is more important is image dimensions; a 1024x768 image is always going to be smaller than a 1600x1200 on a cumputer monitor...or when printed out at 300dpi. Divide your image dimensions buy the print resolution you are going to use, and you will end up with the printed image size. I don't think going much beyond 300dpi for print is worth it, as I believe that the human eye has trouble picking detail up at any resolution finer than that. For monitor/TV viewing you can get away with a lot less, because monitor resolution is finite. No matter what the dpi is of an image, a 4000x4000 image will always be larger than a 1000x1000 on a monitor....the dpi will have little or no bearing on how good it looks on a monitor. Cheers

'I've recently discovered, thanks to the awesome tutorials on Daz' Arcana site, that the map size of the lights makes a difference' Yep, NEVER use the default 256 size. Bump it up to 1024 for all lights. And try using something like 0.100 for soft shadows, instead of the default 1.000. mac

A 3000 x3000 image has the same number of pixels at 300 dpi as it does at 72 dpi. The difference ends up being that a printer prints more fine detail when it's told to display 300 dots of ink within an inch of space than when it's told to display 72 dots of ink within an inch of space. For that matter, a 768 x 432 animation has the same number of pixels whether it's 300 dpi or 72 dpi. It might be displayed differently on the monitor, but the monitor is still working with the same number of pixels. Obviously, if the monitor is displaying more pixels per inch, the graphic will look sharper. However computer monitors can show different resolutions - 640 x 480, 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, etc. TVs, on the other hand, have a fixed resolution. BTW, Silver, I did some checking on the 16:9 thing Friday and finished up just now. My boss said that when he'd done the 16:9 widescreen DVDs, he'd set up the graphics like it said in our Sonic DVD Burner manual. I looked in the manual and there's a table entitled "DVD-compliant source picture resolution." It lists 720 x 480 and 704 x 480 as the appropriate NTSC picture resolutions for both 16:9 and 4:3 Aspect Ratio DVDs. I just looked at my Adobe After Effects presets and there's one called "NTSC DV Widescreen." It's also 720 x 480. That doesn't make sense to me. I'm guessing that something in the settings must adapt the display to look 16:9. The pixels sure don't equal that. Hopefully someone will come along who knows the technical detail on that. As I said in the email, I've never messed with 16:9. I also did an experiment with After Effects. I created a 300 x 300 square. I saved a copy at 72 dpi and one at 300 dpi. I imported the copies into After Effects into a standard 720 x 480 composition. They both displayed at exactly the same size on the screen. Since the output is fixed, After Effects will have to compute the resizing of the 300 dpi version each frame that it renders. The output will look the same. Thus, I don't think the 300 dpi for video buys you any quality in the end product. It looks like you would end up adding calculations (and thus render time) to any post production, rendering, or DVD encoding you do. I've always done my animations and stuff for video at 72 dpi. FWIW, I've never seen any video software that gave you a choice to change the dpi at all. All of it that I've used - Avid Media Composers, Avid Express, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects - operates at 72 dpi.

Hi Bobasar I'm not an expert in this, but I believe this is where the definition of DVD "anamorphic" widescreen comes in. In this case the image resolution is (say) 720 x 480 (3:2), but the pixels aren't square, ie the image is stretched horizontally to give a 16:9 ratio on the screen. Bill

That's part of what I find weird. The 720 x 480 ratio already accounts for rectangular pixels. If one renders 720 x 480 using square computer pixels, they display on TV stretched vertically.

I have been useing Photoshop for so long this poser DPI thing still confuses me a bit but i am starting to come around. I use 300 DPI and 1600 x 1200 because it gives me a nice print if I want a 8 x 10 and its the same size I always use for digital. But its a personal preferance. Whats more important is the file type you save it as not so much the DPI. Do NOT use the built in JPG settings even at the highest setting it still has a great amount of loss . Use BMP or Tiff even the PNG is better than the JPG. Reason I say to render at 1600 x 1200 is papper comes in 8 x 10 and 2000 x 2000 isnt going to fit right , like other said your monitor isnt a square either so use the same setting as you can for it in your properties section.

The DPI number you put in Poser doesn't mean anything at all. You get EXACTLY the same render at 1600x1200 pixels 72 DPI and 300 DPI. You can always change the DPI number in your image editor. DPI only means something to a program that prints.

When I worked pre-press at the print house, this is how we explained it to customers that wanted to supply their own artwork: 300 dpi at the size you want the job printed is good for color. 600 dpi at the size you want the job printed is good for fine lines, like small point-sized text, for example. Monitors display slightly higher than 72 dpi, so a 300-dpi image should look *slightly better than a 72-dpi image on-screen -- but only marginally so. What is more important is the dimensions of the image. This confuses a lot of people, because they know they can change the resolution of their monitors from 800x600 to 1024x768, etc. -- but these are pixel dimensions, not the dpi resolution -- which is always going to be the slightly-more-than-72 dpi mentioned previously. Hope this helps :-)

No, I'm afraid it doesn't make any difference, as the dpi value is ignored when displaying an image on the screen. Only the pixel dimensions are used and the pixels are the same size on a screen with a given resolution regardless of the value of the dpi, even if the dpi is set to a value less than the actual screen pixel size. dpi is only represented as a single numerical field in the header of the image file, and can easily be changed after the file has been generated, with no effect on the contents. As noted above, some printing methods may use this, and an image that fills a page at a low dpi may be only the size of a postage stamp at a higher dpi. The amount of detail is the same in both images, since there are same number of primitive picture elements (pixels) in both; all that the dpi does is compress the image into a smaller space (hence the reduction in size). As noted, however, most modern software easily allows the image to be arbitrarily resized, effectively bypassing the dpi setting. Bill