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I have a crop that a customer gave me of some art work that she did. She wants me to put them in print. This is a whole new ballpark for me, but I figured I'd give it a try. So, she decided that she didn't like her crop and she wanted more water in it. I sent it to photoshop, used the magic wand and tada!! She was thrilled and it was exactly what she wanted.
Today I messed with it a little more and decided that I should print if off to make sure it looked as good as it did on screen. Big problem, it looks like the resolution was affected. Anyone know what I might possibly have done wrong?
i'm guessing the image is still a jpeg. Make sure the resolution is at 300 dpi. There are different tricks to making an image print well. You can rasterize an image in black in white and play with the threshold.
__________________ "well, you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't."Bart Simpson www.wabangwear.wordpress.com
What the customer has done is paint a picture, then used a digital camera to take a picture of said painting. Then she has cropped it to get out what is doesn't want in print. Then she burned them on a disc for me. What I'm left with is about 72ppi. I did change that to 300 ppi and sharpened the image. That helped significatly on all but one image. She has already sold the originals so I don't have access to them. All she has are her original photographs that she took with her digital.
I'll just have to do the best I can with what she has given me and see what she says. It makes it harder for me because I've never seen the originals to know what the colors actually were. So, I make some changes and she has to come down and see if it's closer to what she's looking for. Very time consuming on my end, but hopefully it will be worth it.
Ya i hear ya. You can only do so much with what your given. As far as the colors go, just make them look good. Color is always lost or interperated differently from an original painting to the process of a digital file. Just make it look good. Go to image>adjust> that will give you many options to make the photo look intense and visiually pleasing. color balance, contrast, hue & saturation etc. play around with that stuff. But be carefull you don't stray too far from the original. 9 times outta 10 you can make it look better then the original. ANd ya time consuming, just educate them on the process and don't forget to charge artwork fee for you time.
__________________ "well, you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't."Bart Simpson www.wabangwear.wordpress.com
If your at 72dpi, your resolution is too low for a good print. 72dpi is computer screen resolution and will look different that when printed. Photoshop didn't do it to you, your customer did by sending less than acceptable art work for the intended purpose.
Even when you changed the dpi to 300 you did not add resolution, and sharpening can only do a little bit to help. Download Alien Skin's Blowup 2. It gives you 30 days full functionality to try it out. See if you can increase the dpi and get some good results with the Photoshop plugin.
In the future have a generic email or handout ready that explains the issues to give to customers asking if you can print graphics they send in.
yea you're talking about over sampling. if you're given a 72 dpi image it can only be printed at the size she gave it to you. all the computer does when you change the dpi on that file is add pixels next to existing pixels of the same color. why would she take pics at such a low dpi? and she's an artist? guess she ain't too hip on technology.
Have your client give you the original digital file and crop it your self and make it match what she gave you. This way you have no resolution loss. The add the water effect you had before.
Thanks, you've all been so helpful. This is a new area in the business for me. I have very limited experience with photoshop. The magic wand is my best friend and that's about it.
I'll try the alien skin and see what I can do. See's a very good artist, but very lacking with technology. She said that she is taking all pictures of her artwork with a 12 megapixel camera and then her son is doing all the cropping and burning. I have no idea what program they are using to crop with. I can ask her to just get me all the originals and I'll do the cropping myself. The problem is that some of her work is on canvas and other pieces are on palets so the paint hole and the hand curve all have to be cropped out and still leave her the main part of the image that she wants. That's why I was having her do the cropping.
When I open all the images off the burned disc she gave me they all come in at 72 ppi.
You don't need 300 dpi. You only need twice your output. So if you're outputting at a 55 line screen you only need 110 dpi at size. If there's text in the image then you should redo the text in a vector application and put them together in a page layout application such as indesign, illustrator, freehand or quark to output film, so that fonts are at 300 dpi and the image can be at the lower resolution. You will not lose quality and it will look great, if there's any other questions or problems you can email me the file and i'll do it for you.
You don't need 300 dpi. You only need twice your output. So if you're outputting at a 55 line screen you only need 110 dpi at size. If there's text in the image then you should redo the text in a vector application and put them together in a page layout application such as indesign, illustrator, freehand or quark to output film, so that fonts are at 300 dpi and the image can be at the lower resolution. You will not lose quality and it will look great, if there's any other questions or problems you can email me the file and i'll do it for you.
that's absolutely the wrong advice to give someone who's not tech saavy. his customer (from now on) should go at LEAST 300 dpi. in fact i'd go even higher for retouching purposes and then bump it down. a 12 megapixel camera is way capable of capturing images at high rez. why give him images at 72 dpi? sounds like the son who cropped the stuff changed the dpi so it'd fit on his monitor instead of changing the magnification. but he's also talking about an artist who paints full color stuff. what printing method are you thinking of that's gonna "be just fine" with 72 dpi files?
You don't need 300 dpi. You only need twice your output. So if you're outputting at a 55 line screen you only need 110 dpi at size. If there's text in the image then you should redo the text in a vector application and put them together in a page layout application such as indesign, illustrator, freehand or quark to output film, so that fonts are at 300 dpi and the image can be at the lower resolution. You will not lose quality and it will look great, if there's any other questions or problems you can email me the file and i'll do it for you.
The reason for working at 300 dpi is that the art will be at a resolution that will work for all printing methods, not just the bare necessities for screen printing. What if the art is going to be printed on an auto with 130 line screens?
Also, unraterized text in Photoshop is vector, so there is no need to go into Illustrator to get vector text. Photoshop can utilize vector elements right along with the raster elements.
In Photoshop a vector element is called a Smart Object. I create vector elements in Illustrator and place them into a Photoshop document all the time. They are full vector elements in Photoshop, just called Smart Objects.
If you don't want straight vector text, you could use the text tool in Illustrator and convert the text to lines. Then you place the converted text in Photoshop as a Smart Object. You don't lose anything, and all of the art is in Photoshop with all the Layer Style features availible to apply to it.
I decided that maybe I should attach one of her pictures so that you guys can atleast see what one of the images is. This is one of about 20 that she wants done. It's in jpeg as that all I could get to load.
I think it was mentioned earlier, so forgive me for going over the same thing again. If you are going to work with a photographer you should get the pictures in RAW format. Photoshop can work with RAW format pictures. If she can't give you RAW, then you need high resolution Jpegs.
If she has photographs she has already taken, and she only has them in low res Jpegs, she is just out of luck and will not be able to have the pictures scaled up and keep things sharp and clean. She will have to learn from this for future photos she might take and want to have printed in some large format, whether screen printed to even posters.
mark is correct. this happens alot to people in the prepress arena. people come into a shop and expect you to be able to do things remarkable with what they have. and alot of people not in the biz don't understand the in's and out's of what is necessary for high quality work. tell her to give the media capture card to you next time with the images on it and go from there. i always tell people to capture the image at the highest resolution possible.
What am I doing wrong with photoshop? 
