The most important concept when asking ‘How big can my image be printed?’ is that the bigger you print an image, the less detail will be in it. The reason is because there’s only so many pixels (dots) making up your digital image. The bigger the image is printed, the bigger the dots are printed.
Let’s take an image that has 2000 pixels in width and 1000 pixels in height
If we print that 2000px by 1000px image at 100 DPI, it’ll be 20” x 10” and the dots will be pretty small (there’s 100 of them in every inch = 100 DPI).
At half the DPI (50 DPI), it’ll be twice as big (40” x 20”) but the dots are much more noticeable.
Image courtesy of Tristan Murphy Photography
We’ve printed images at very low resolutions (eg; 50 DPI) but because it resulted in such a large canvas, people would tend to stand back to view the canvas. The further back you stand, the harder it is to see the dots.
The question is, at what point will YOU think that the quality isn’t ‘good enough’?
We draw a line in the sand at 100 DPI
For most images printed on canvas, most people can’t see any obvious quality issues when printed at 100 DPI.
2000px x 1000px image = 20” x 10”
As you can see, the maths is pretty easy when trying to work out how big your canvas will be if printed at 100 DPI.
If you half that minimum, and print at 50 DPI, your image will be 'half the minimum quality'. So you can see that a 10 DPI image will be '10% of the MINIMUM quality' - which is REALLY pushing it! |
