Poor Quality Images

Have you ever wondered why your images look ok on screen but when you print them out they look poor quality?

This is because an image can be lower quality or lower resolution on screen and still look fine. But to be printed out, the quality or resolution needs to be higher to have the same visual quality.

You want the files to be smaller when they are viewed on screen as they will then take less time to load up: so a lower quality file will not have as much information stored in it, will be smaller in size and therefore will load up more quickly. But you need to think again if you want to use the same image for printing out.

A very common file type that is used for online images is a jpeg or jpg. It is a file type that creates smaller sized images that are commonly used online.

With a jpg, some of the information that is in the image is thrown away when it is saved and this can mean the file loses quality. You can see something like watermarks on the image that appear, and these are called artifacts. You can see these here when we zoom in on the picture.

You can see this process depicted more clearly in this image:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG

Understanding this helps explain why the images can be low quality when printing out and you can then consider saving them in different formats that don’t throw away the image information when they are being used for printing such as tiffs, pdfs and so on.

If you’d like to understand more about this subject, you can access this course which is written to help: File Types and Sizes. It was initally written for designers and artists but it has been helping lots of people that work in the digital age.

If you press the follow button here, you can make the most of a freebie, which is to access this course for free. Once you have subscribed, access this link and you can see the code you need: free course code