Entering a contest, need to know what 300dpi means?

Question

Entering a contest, need to know what 300dpi means?

Answer 1

Dpi =dots per inch

Answer 2

It means they don't know WTF they be talking about...!

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DPI is from the old days of mechanical printing when a mask was used to apply ink to paper via rollers. The finer the holes the better photo quality. News paper is around 72 to 90 DPI and fine magazines were the max @ 300. If manufacturing techniques could make finer holes the ink could go through, we might have had 400 or more as the standard.

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Read - The Myth of DPI...

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http://www.rideau-info.com/photos/index.html

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From a 3000x2000 pixel image I can make a 16x20 print and the image can be set at 10 DPI or 1000 DPI.. It don't freekin' matter because it's PIXEL density that counts and there ARE no DPI's in a digital image. Trouble is, many of todays image editing programs have their roots in the old, but real printing world, so they still have this DPI stuff programed in as a size guide.

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Good luck here. Only until you actually experience real printing on a larger printer will you start to understand it is PIXELS that count and DPI is only a number.

Answer 3

It really doesn't mean anything by itself.



An image can only have a single pixel and still be 300 dpi. However it would only be 1/300 of an inch wide.



In order for dpi to have some meaning, you have to have a size that goes along with it.

Answer 4

AI is a native format of 'Adobe illustrator' and PSD is of 'Adobe Photoshop'.

DPI is the dots per inch that the printer is going to put on the paper. (simple!) The higher the density of the dots, the more the resolution on the paper.

For the contest , shoot the photograph at the highest resolution that your camera permits, and submit it in PSD or AI format without tinkering with the image size. It would conform to 300 DPI by itself.

If at all you try to resize it just make sure that you leave the 'resample' box in the photoshop or illustrator UN- checked.

Answer 5

the higher the dpi, the higher is the number of dots in tht inch..so you can print larger pictures.

in competitions, they may want to standardize the size they want to expand the pic, so they specify a dpi.



eg. imagine if you have a 1 inch square pic with just 100 dots inside, and another 1 inch square pic with 300 dots inside. now if you expand both of them to a 4 inch square...which one will be sharper? no prizes for guessing!



now imagine making it much larger...the 100 dpi pic will have lots of empty spaces in between creating a blur while the 300dpi pic will have more dots in places missing for the other pic!

Answer 6

It has to do with the size/quality of the image. Like, you can scan a picture and the dpi will affect how big the file size is, and also how large the picture is. Honestly, the only experience I have with dpi is with scanners, and the more dots per inch, the larger the picture/file size, so that's the best I can do for telling you.



edit - they probably want it to be a certain resolution or larger so they can display it/ resize it as they wish...