Want Digital Photos In Your Next Brochure?

If you are developing a brochure or other printed piece and need to take photos to be used, here are a few things you need to understand in order to make sure you are correctly taking those photos to ensure that they print clear and crisp.

First of all you need understand the term DPI or dots per inch. This is a term that commercial printers and designers use to describe resolution. Most printers print at a resolution of 300 DPI or above. This would be considered a high resolution. Photos and images that you see on the web are typically only 72 DPI and considered low resolution. For this simple reason, photos that are optimized for the web usually are too low of a resolution to print with a commercial printer. There are things you can do to work around this, but that topic is for another article.

So now you want to take a digital photo with your camera for your brochure. You need to make sure that the camera’s megapixels are high enough. Typically new cameras today are usually a minimum of 4 megapixels, which is more than sufficient as long as you have the camera save the photo in its highest quality setting. Most cameras have a feature that allows you to save the quality of the photo in either low, medium or high. As a rule of thumb, set it to high. It is always better to overcompensate on the high side rather that use a low setting and have your photo turn out fuzzy when you print it.

If you have a digital SLR then you will have more of a choice of how the camera saves the photo. I am not going to go through this because if you have a digital SLR then there is a good chance that you understand all of this and what you are doing.

If you do what I said above, then the photos you take will be well over the 300 DPI that will produce high quality photos in your brochure, newsletter, catalog, or whatever project you are working on. If your photo is going to be placed on a billboard or other large format graphic display, then there are other things that need to be considered so that the photo still looks clear when it is printed . That discussion is for another day. Till next time…