I'm looking for the best way to resize pics from my digicam into the standard 8x10, 5x7, 4x6, etc. I often do a bit of cropping and touch-up, but very little. I currently take the pics from my digicam (Kodak dc290), usually at 400-600K/16x24 inches/72dpi, open them in Photoshop, crop them to the size I wish and at 360 ppi res. This, in turn, yields very large files, and I'm not sure I'm actually doing what is needed for the best prints. Does anyone have any suggestions/hints/help?

Much appreciated! Christopher Borges

-- Christopher Borges (christojb@aol.com), April 16, 2000

Answers

If you match your prints in Photoshop to your printers DPI You will get large files because to achieve this even a 6x4 print adds pixels (interpolates) Why? Your resolution is 1152x1728 and 72 PPI to make a 6x4 print you need 6x360dpix4x360dpi or 2160x1440 which is more pixels than you started with so photoshop adds whats required and hence your file gets bigger. I have found after using many printers from all the major manufacturers that if you use a 3rd of the printer max DPI to resize your images this produces very acceptable 6x4 and even 5x7 prints but for the 8x10 print use the maximum DPI and live with the larger file size. Photoshop is very good at resampling images and if you use the method above sometimes you throw away pixels and sometimes you add some but your pictures will not suffer as much as you may think.

Hope this helps.

-- Arnold Edmondson (Arnold@rimmer73.fsnet.co.uk), April 28, 2000.