Read through your scantips and understand more than before. Thanks for your
work here.
Question: If I print a scanned neg NOTon my $200 color printer but rather
go to Walgreens or some other photo print house do your scan/print
resolution and scaling rules still apply?
Thanks again. Joe
Hi Joe,
Yes, the idea is the same (pixels per inch), and you scale them exactly that
same way, in the sense of making sure you have sufficient pixels. However
generally these services will go by the print size you request, like 6x4
inches or 5x7 inches, and will scale whatever pixels you give them to print
that requested size in inches, instead of reading your scaled dpi in the
file to determine the printed size. So in this case, the important thing is
to have enough pixels to print that size in the 250 to 300 dpi range, and it
is not very important if you actually do it (they're going to do it again).
If you scale them yourself, then you know what you have, but I wouldnt save
a JPG file a second time just only for that reason (dont want additional
JPG artifacts).
Such printing services will use a Fuji Frontier/Noritsu type of printer
(prints by exposing conventional photo paper), which will want up to 300
dpi, for prints up to 8x10 inch size. Somewhat less will be good too.
Large prints like 16x20 inches are normally printed at much lower
resolutions, more like 100 dpi - be best to ask for their instructions for
those large cases.
