The digital revolution has arrived.

The digital revolution has arrived… and if you want to dodge the digital firing squad, and keep your digital head on your digital shoulders with all these digitally confusing products in this digital age, you better get digital! Yeah… I really don’t know about all that, so we’re just going to talk about pictures.
Point, click, print… digital! No more developing. Dark rooms are history. Yeah, yeah, I know, 99 percent of the digital pictures we take just get filed away somewhere on some lonely hard drive or put up on Facebook for your friends to make fun of. But, what about the pictures you actually want to frame and hang on your wall? You know, the photos that don’t cause you any shame… you don’t have any of those, huh? So what about printing photos of other people and putting them on your wall? You know, the embarrassing ones.
Here’s What You Ought To Know about Digital Printing… it’s digital! I’m kidding.
Have you ever heard of DPI? It doesn’t mean “Digital Product Incompetence.” It means “Dots Per Inch.” So, let’s look a digital image of, I don’t know, me. When you zoom right in on the eyeball you can see the pixels, little individual blocks of color.
Now, when the inkjet printer prints out the picture, instead of making a little color square, it squirts out a little dot of ink. If it puts those dots closer together you get a sharper, smoother image. If it spaces them farther apart, the resulting image is grainy.
Photograph quality for an inkjet printer is typically between 200 and 400 DPI or better, while the images that are on the internet are usually around 72 DPI. Yes, this is the reason why pictures printed from your friend’s websites look dumpy. But isn’t digital always high-quality? (Shakes head no)
Pixels are really important. The more pixels in an image means you have more information, and you can print them closer together. If you start with a small image, like 300 pixels by 150 pixels, you can change the DPI all you want, but it won’t print well. Even if you take it to the store it won’t look good, because the digital information just ins’t there. And the more you blow it up the worse it will look.
If you have image-editing software like Adobe Photoshop, you can adjust the dots pet inch without changing the pixel size of the image. It just makes it print smaller and cleaner, or bigger and nastier. I say go for Big Nasty, because it’s digital!
The kind of paper you choose makes a difference, too. Photo paper can hold those little ink squirts together closer, whereas normal paper lets them bleed out out a bit, and smears up the image. So being cheap on paper really isn’t a good idea… and I know about cheap. You should be printing on paper that looks shiny, kind of like the pictures you get back… when you take them to have them developed… digitally!
So now you’ve learned a new acronym, you know a little bit more about how DPI works, and hopefully you can survive the digital revolution. Or at least document it with photos… digital ones!
Nerd Fact: Digital comes from the Latin word for “Finger.”
Transcribed by: Pocstar
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21 Comments
Marnee
: Jennifer McKenzie I'm pretty sure Becky isn't entirely correct. Pixels refers to dimensions (digitally, of course). On digital ...Becky
: Jennifer McKenzie thorondor is correct. Yet another argument for certification in the US for Graphic Designers. Flame on!Lilmissgeek [22]
Another thing to keep in mind is that if you have your pictures printed by a company they usually either ...buccs743
i am gonna have to tell everyone about this guybuccs743
very funnyNospinplease
That is a good video! I always wondered why my pictures that I printed turned out like crap. I have ...Nospinplease
ummm... that is odd it posted the comment on this video. hmmm I shall copy and paste back in that ...Nospinplease
are you still going to do the underground? I like those videos too! I love duct tape. One time I ...Mr. Curar
I'm actually currently working on this project so I found this interesting. Loved the ending with the nerd tip, keep ...steph {207}
You can also get a digital picture frame for a digital photo you took from a digital camera. Its really ...CFTW {207}
Hmm... I usually have a LOT of SMALL pictures so I vector them :DMeandering {207}
Wow, an episode up my alley in Marketing/Graphic Design. Something that everyone ought to know is something I already ...thorondor {207}
because those people don't care about technicalitiesJennifer McKenzie
You can print pictures off your computer? Okay. I'm kidding. I knew that. I never knew what DPI meant. ...Becky
Hmmm... nit-picker Graphic Designer here. "Pixels" refers only to digital (electronic, on-screen) information. "DPI" refers only to physical ...Curtis
Does that mean my digital clock is really a moving picture?edthemanily
The word "digitial" seems to be in the same phase of being a buzz word as "turbo" was a few ...kahrytan
Except the paper photo centers use to print is light sensitive. I asked a photo center person at Costco ...Chrissy
so much digital! maybe on a future episode you can say it more than you did in this one. make a ...Heidi
Marc-I've done that. :) I don't suggest it. :)Marc
What if I took a digital photo of digital photo? I know... I am just being crazy.