I guess we have all heard of ‘dpi’- but what does it actually mean?

Well DPI is the amount of Dots Per Inch- that is to say how may printable marks you can cram into an inch of print. The higher the number the smoother your images will look. The trade off of course is that with rastered or image work the files size will rise dramatically which may make your documents difficult to print, store and email.

The lesson to learn here is to think about your dpi settings before you create your document- be it a flyer, leaflet or web graphic. Web images are generally created at 96dpi so that they look great on screen and don’t hog bandwidth when viewed on a web-site. For printing images here at print Colchester, we recommend setting your document size to at least 300 dpi for photos- but for best quality output on our digital printing presses we advise 600 dpi to fully take advantage of our printing equipment.

So how do we achieve this in Adobe Photoshop? Well the key is to take notice when we first create our document. Say we want to create an A4 flyer or leaflet to print. When we click file / new we choose 21cm wide x 29.7cm high with a resolution of 600dpi. Now choose CMYK colour mode for best results with your print documents. Now you have a perfect size and setting for digital print!

If you need advanced settings for your documents (maybe a bleed area is required?) please check out our full guide for further details – https://www.printcolchester.co.uk/designing-for-print/#5.

Of course you can always ask us to create the perfect document for you.