Beautiful colors

[Bill W. White]

Got the ricoh printer set up with conde's ICC file and what a difference the colors are. Even satisfied with the colors on corian.They are not as bright and don't pop like on the message boards but the colors are certainly good enough for me. I'm going to be doing a lot of black and white pictures and they look almost exactly like the original photo. So my next question is can I down load pic's off the internet and then take them to photoshop and increase the resolution to 200 DPI and get OK results. One of the u tube videos I watched said the resolution needed to be between 150 and 200 to get good results. Any help with this would sure be appreciated Bill W.

[Ross Moshinsky]

Frankly, I could probably write 50,000 words on this subject and not really cover the topic fully to satisfy everyone. I'll just post a few points.

1. When Photoshop works in DPI, it's simply doing a simple mathematical conversion to give you a desired print size. It's a scaling factor. When you save a 2"x2" file at 100dpi and a 1"x1" file at 200dpi, they are the same exact file. They'll print the same. They'll look the same. They are the same. Photoshop is just scaling the photos to make bridge the gap between pixels to dpi to inches.

2. High resolution does not always mean high quality. Photographers will get into this argument frequently. A $100 camera which can shoot at 15 megapixels will most likely not produce nearly as nice photos at a $2000 camera at 10 megapixels but if that $2000 camera takes a bunch of 1 megapixel photos and you try to print them at 8x11, the $100 camera will look better. It's a balancing act between high quality and high resolution.

3. When using Google looking for images, search based on resolution. That's typically the best way to find photos worth using off the internet. Again, the high resolution photo might have been saved as a very low quality JPEG so it may look like garbage so resolution is not always the end all be all, but using a low resolution image and increasing the DPI typically isn't the answer either.

Practical knowledge
You're eyes will almost always tell you if an image is garbage.
Bigger is better 99% of the time. If its not high resolution, it's probably going to print poorly.
Convert anything you can to vector artwork. Vector art is king.
Read about the difference between resolution and dpi and quality. There are tons of articles. After you read them, realize unless you're dealing with a photo nerd or a graphic designer, they won't understand anything you're talking about and they'll send you a 200px x 350 px piece of art and expect it to sublimate just fine.
Test, test, test. Mark up your material cost 2-3x so you can run tests. Don't assume everything is going to work out. If the material is really expensive and you can't test on the exact substrate, get something you can test on, and test it on that.

[Scott Shepherd]

Aside from the technical aspects which Ross covered, for the most part, it's against copyright laws to take images from the internet and use them for profit. Basically, you cannot use a photo unless you have the permission of the creator.

If you want photos to use, visit a stock photography site like istockphoto or dreamstime and purchase the photos. It's normally about $50 per photo to buy the rights to use it on products you plan to sell. If you just want it for other uses, where it won't be sold and resold, you can get them for a couple of dollars.

I saw a post on another forum where a guy posted something he did, using a photo as a background, which he sold to a customer. Someone did some searching and found the creator of the photo, emailed him, and he went after the guy pretty hard. There was speculation that he may be shutting the guys business down, but no one ever confirmed it because the guy that took the image and used it without permission never posted again.

It's a very risky thing to do and it's a good idea to start handling images correctly (buying them) in the beginning.

[Larry Bratton]

I do not take exception to anything that Ross or Scott has said. I probably spend wayyyy too much time trying to find usable images for sublimation or engraving ideas. Here is some advice, try it and see if it works for you. If you are doing searches on Google Images, go to Advanced and specify Large as your size. If you can get an image of sufficient size, and most will be either 72 or 96 dpi, you can usually get a good small print from it. I take it into Corel Photopaint, open Image/ Resample. Uncheck, anti-alias, check Maintain Image size. Start reducing your image by percentages and as you go down, you will see your dpi increase accordingly. This is basically compacting the pixels in the image into a smaller space. I try to accomplish 300 but that is not always necessary to get decent output if your image is going to be small in size. David Gross at Conde uses this methodology and I think there is a video on it somewhere. Not ideal in every case but it works.

As far as finding images goes, caution is well advised there. The public domain is a great place to look. There are probably millions of things, images, articles, documents etc that the copyrights have expired on. Finding them can be a bit time consuming, but they are out there. Here is just one link that will find you a bunch of stuff http://www.princetonol.com/groups/ia...s/clipart.html

[Martin Boekers]

A few things, in PS if you go to image and size you will see the resolution. At the bottom there is a box called "Resample"
If left unchecked, things will behave like Ross said. You can change the size or resolution and will act like Ross said.
Now, if you check that box it will resample the file and change it. So yes you can improve an image by resampling at a higher
resolution. You will have to play with it a bit to see what works the best. There are some programs that help with this. Genuine Fractals
is a good one. It can make the best of a bad situation.

Three things to remember...

1. NEVER work with the original ALWAYS work from a duplicate!

2. Just because a file is large (high res) doesn't mean quality is great.
Compression does have an affect on things.

3. While working with the image save back up as TIFF as it doesn't
lose information, a JPG does.


The better the image starts with the better the final will look.

Typically files that are "photographic" are at least 300DPI at size.
Don't skimp on DPI if you have a choice.

[Larry Bratton]

Photoshop is actually pretty good at ressing up. It uses a pretty sophisticated algorithm to accomplish the mission. When in the Photoshop Resize/Resample function, you can click on Auto and at the Best setting, it will return 266ppi. If resample has been selected, then the image is resized accordingly. But, I think we all agree, if it's garbage to start with, then it's going to be garbage coming out. However,I am beginning to see better and better quality in images on the net though and I am also seeing a lot more in .png format than jpg.

[Martin Boekers]

How did the saying go.... You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig!

Same you start out with a crappy image, you can modify it all you want, but's it's still a
crappy image.

PNG seems to be the new PDF. The big problem
I run into with PNG's is they look fine in the layout
but when you print or laser them they show the box around
them. You have to bring them into PS and save them as a TIFF
so to keep transparency.