Part One of Two :: Digital to Print

Optimization tips to make digital images best for print delivery.

As a former print person, I thought I’d tackle a couple of digital-to-print issues I commonly see (and you probably do to). I thought I’d provide some helpful tips to improve your end results. In these two common examples, the digital-to-print issues are caused by the discrepancy between digital resolution and print requirements. In other words, what print needs, in regards to resolution ( dots per inch dpi/pixels per inch ppi), to look good. In this article, we'll look at some pointers on how to get screenshots to do the job.

(In reviewing my article, a collegue noted that this technique is helpful, but to remember that the reality is that a low resolution image from the web is almost guaranteed to look worse in print regardless of any Photoshop techniques. In other words, this technique will improve the end print result, not make it flawless.)

Common Example #1
Why do my screenshots look poor when printed?

To explain briefly, just taking a screenshot and placing it, in most instances, won’t provide a good quality print result. In order to make the image look better, you need to increase the size of the image. Attempting to magnify a digital image also enlarges the pixels, so unless some type of image interpolation is performed, you don’t just want to throw some additional pixels in there. The following steps will help you go about this in a positive way.

To start, be sure you set your screen resolution to the highest possible to grab your screenshot. Capture your screenshot and place into a new Photoshop file. Once placed, you will then need to set your image to a higher resolution. Print requires more dots per inch (dpi) than digital purposes. If you were to simply resize a 72 dpi/ppi image to 300 dpi/ppi, this typically results in image blurriness and fuzziness. This issue can be resolved by disabling Photoshop’s bicubic resampling (the process that Photoshop uses to resize images). By disabling bicubic resampling Photoshop is forced to multiply pixels as they are, instead of adding new pixels consisting of blended colors to “soften” a resized picture. Typically with this function turned off, photos get messed up but it works wonderfully when you need to resize a screenshot for print. Follow these simple steps:

1. Open your Photoshop Preferences> General dialog box.

2. Switch the interpolation from “Bicubic” to “Nearest Neighbor”

3. Resize your image (via in Photoshop, Image>Image Size dialog box) to  288 dpi or 360 dpi and save in your desired file format (bmp and tiff are good for print)

4. Done. You will have a large print-worthy file to use

*Don’t forget to switch your interpolation settings back to “Bicubic” once you have completed all your screenshots*

When choosing the “Nearest Neighbor” technique for screenshots, also it is a recommended using 100% increments as to avoid ugly jaggies in the interpolation. For example if you have a sharp 2 x 2 pixel image and want it larger issue-free, the best route is a 4 x 4 pixel image. Additionally and technically, it is not recommended that you interpolate 72 dpi directly to 300 dpi - rather choose 288 dpi or 360 dpi instead. Using 300 dpi, you increase the likelihood that you will end up with pixels issues like lines becoming crooked, odd bulges occurring in text output, among others. Additionally, a change in image mode (Image>Mode) from RPG to CMYK, as your printer better handle CMYK color mode.

Choosing “Bilinear” instead of “Nearest Neighbor” is another option. It takes info from the pixels above and to the side of where the new pixel will appear and offers a quality result.

Do a sample of both the “Bilinear” and “Nearest Neighbor” options and choose the option you find is printing out to your liking.

For those who don’t have Photoshop, I found the following (but have not used either product):

ScreenPrinter will allow you to try out their software for free:
http://www.etrusoft.com/screen-capture-software-reviews/Screen_Printer.htm

Ashampoo is recommended by About, and it also has a free trial:
http://graphicssoft.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=graphicssoft&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ashampoo.com%2Ffrontend%2Fproducts%2Fphp%2Fproduct.php%3Fsession_langid%3D2%26idstring%3D0024%26quickmenu%3D0

Next time I’ll talk about Common Example #2 “Why does my digital logo look fuzzy when printed?”