printing above 300dpi, where (and why)?

[Noah B]

Native resolution of the printer is important to take into consideration. You can print as large as you want as long as you keep the print resolution in sync with the resolution of the printer and make sure bicubic auto is on.

[Drew Wiley]

Not a direct answer, but I had an interesting conversation two days ago with a fellow who had been
pretty involved with the development of nano-pigments in Europe. These in my opinion would constitute the holy grail of color printing, but as I suspected, they still have not be able to mfg true
process colors. But it is exciting to know that they recognize the commercail potential of do so - incredibly small truly light-permanent transparent pigments! But at a certain point thus far, there is just
no way around organic dyes (which in fact are a significant component of inkjet inks, namely, pigments
which are really dye lakes). These kinds of nano-pigments have various commecial usages, but with
regards to printing applications today, just certain specialized industrial uses on extremely polished and prepped surfaces. If they ever do unlock primary colors, bye-bye inkjet as we currently know it!

[Valdecus]

The native resolution of Epson printers is 360 dpi whereas Canon and HP are using 300 dpi print heads. If the file has a resolution of less than 360 dpi (in case of Epson) or 300 dpi (in case of HP/Canon), then the printer driver/printer will upsample to 360 dpi or 300 dpi, and likely introduce artifacts. Thus, some sources suggest using either 300 dpi or 360 dpi as the ideal resolution for the files to be printed.

As the printing module in Lightroom is very sophisticated, I usually print out of Lightroom most of the time. Here you can set the software (Lightroom) to upsample to a fixed resolution (i.e. 360 dpi in case of my Epson printer). The upsampling algorithms in Lightroom are much more refined than those in standard print drivers, so you will see the difference here.

If the resolution of the image when printed in a certain size falls above 360 dpi (which is the case when you've scanned film with a high resolution or are using high resolution cameras such as the Nikon D800 or MF backs), Jeff Schewe (author and co-author of various books on Photoshop, image sharpening and color management, as well as printing guru) recommends upsampling to 720 dpi (or 600 dpi for Canon(HP) in Lightroom. In addition to that (and when using a pro level Epson printer), he recommends setting the Printer Settings > Output Resolution in Lightroom to "Super Photo - 2880 dpi", uncheck "Highspeed" and check "Finest Detail". In my experience, this really makes a difference when using Lightroom as your "print engine".

Jeff Schewe has written an interesting article with samples to prove his findings here:
http://www.digitalphotopro.com/techn...esolution.html

You may need to follow a different strategy when using RIPs such as ColorBytes ImagePrint or others, though.

Cheers,
Andreas

[Laron]

wow, thank you all for the useful comments! there are some very interesting aspects I was not aware at all...
seems like once its about photography, things gets denser around Dusseldorf...

[Ken Lee]

Jeff Schewe has written an interesting article with samples to prove his findings here:
http://www.digitalphotopro.com/techn...esolution.html

According to that article (since many of us use Photoshop):

"If you print from Photoshop, you'll need to do some additional steps to take advantage of upsampled printing. You'll need to use the Image Size command to upsample your image to the desired output resolution."

.. which unless I am mistaken, means we simply need to resize the image accordingly, which is probably what many of us already do.

Are we correct in presuming that Photoshop does as good a job at up-sampling as Lightroom ?

[bob carnie]

I would think upsampling in Photoshop to be every bit as good as upsampling in Lightroom

According to that article (since many of use Photoshop):

"If you print from Photoshop, you'll need to do some additional steps to take advantage of upsampled printing. You'll need to use the Image Size command to upsample your image to the desired output resolution."

.. which unless I am mistaken, means we simply need to resize the image accordingly, which is probably what many of us already do.

Are we correct in presuming that Photoshop does as good a job at up-sampling as Lightroom ?

[mortensen]

... maybe even the same algorithm

[Valdecus]

... maybe even the same algorithm

Almost. As Jeff states in the above mentioned article, LR applies a slightly modified upsampling (and downsampling) routine in comparison to Photoshop:
"In fact, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom resampling is a hybrid Bicubic algorithm that interpolates between Bicubic and Bicubic Smoother for upsampling and Bicubic and Bicubic Sharper for downsampling."

Cheers,
Andreas

[John Rodriguez]

Currently Lightroom supposedly does a better job with uprezzing for the reason that Valdecus mentioned. I expect the next version of PS will have a similar routine added.

[paulr]

If there are differences I bet they're subtle. I used to not be able to tell the difference between a file uprezed in photoshop and one eprezzed by the Epson driver. I finally found a site that showed side by side examples. It was the kind of comparison where I literallly had to be shown where to look and what to look for. And these were of very high resolution scans of inkjet prints. I don't think this kind of difference will be noticeable under normal viewing conditions except under unusual circumstances. I generally now interpolate to 360ppi in photoshop or lightroom, but it's on general principle.