Was exporting at 72 DPI for 6 months before a client called me out

I'd been uploading my digital paintings to a print-on-demand shop and wondering why everything looked fuzzy when it arrived. A customer sent me a photo of their print and you could literally see the pixel grid... I felt sick. I opened my file settings and realized I had the DPI set to 72 the whole time, not 300. Has anyone else made this stupid rookie mistake or am I the only one who missed this basic setting?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_michael1d ago

actually DPI doesn't really matter for digital files the way most people think... it's PPI you want to worry about for print. DPI is for printers, PPI is for your image file. 72 PPI is the standard for screens, 300 PPI is what you send to a print shop. I made the same mistake when I first started selling prints on Etsy. A friend who works at a print shop explained it to me - your file just needs enough pixels total, the PPI setting is basically a tag telling the printer how big the image should be. If you had a 3000 pixel wide image at 72 PPI it would print at about 41 inches wide, but at 300 PPI it would be 10 inches. So you weren't just missing a setting, you were telling the printer to blow your image up way too big.

skyler_white9516h ago

so wait when you say the PPI is basically a tag telling the printer how big the image should be, does that mean i could set a high PPI on a low-res image and it would just print like pixelated garbage? like the printer would try to cram too few pixels into a small space? i always thought PPI was just some nerdy setting nobody actually understands lol. i see people arguing about 72 vs 300 all the time in photography groups but nobody ever explains the math behind it like this. makes me wonder if half the people selling prints online even know what theyre doing.