I have fallen in love with my 2019 iPad that I got for Christmas and the Procreate app. The above image is what I think I look like while working on it... a fantasy come true. I thought that you might like some tips on how to plan your digital work images on your Procreate, your phone, or computer.
Sizing is KEY
When you start your digital creation, it is important to consider how big you might want to print the piece. The more pixels you have on an image the better it prints and it will also resize much better. To print a piece, it needs to have 300 pixels per inch of the size you want to print (also known as 300DPI). It also needs to be clear and sharp at 100% zoom at that size.
The illusion of digital. The biggest mistake my customers run into is that on all of our digital devices show us images that are sized at 72 ppi (pixels per inch aka dots per inch or dpi the terms are used interchangeably) and by some magical wizardly it looks fantastic if you are looking at a 60" TV, or your cell phone, all of those images look great on the screens, but are still the same extremely small digital files. The CSI show you saw last night clarifying and sharpening that video footage to recognize and catch that criminal... pure and utter bunk theatrics - not possible once the image is reduce; it loses data, the data is gone, and is simply not there to resize the image.
All of this creates the idea that an image downloaded from online or created for online services and seen on your 60" TV will be able to be printed large. This is simply an illusion that the screen technology has mastered and do not match the requirements to get an amazing print. These images do not work for printing because we need 300 ppi to print without seeing all of the pixels in the print.
When you have a piece that is 72 dpi and it's 600 x 1200 pixel that is a printable image of 2"x4" (600/300px by 1200/300px) but it will look pretty good on any screen 8"x"16" (600/72 px by 1200/72px) It is best to start your digital image at the 300 ppi size you intend to print it in the end.
To calculate the final printable image you multiply each dimension (width and height) by 300. This is the size in pixels your image will look fantastic printed.
Images that are larger are easier to resize without loss of detail. So if you find your device struggling to perform at 16"x20" or 4800 px by 6000 px you can safely bring the resolution down to 250, but I wouldn't take it any lower than that.
Keep in mind, once you go down and save it as a smaller file, the quality you had at the larger resolution is gone for anything but a screen. When you upload your images to Facebook and other social media the images are resized by the service and are way too small to get you a print over 3 inches. This is because all of those services must downsize all of the images on their platform in order for all of their users to get the content (data) quick and easy. Think how unpopular the site would be if we had to wait for each of their 350 million pictures a day to upload to our timeline at more than 3 times their original size! Side note: This is also a great safety feature to keep your images from being printed and reproduced from these platforms. So, feel free to share but always keep your original size file.
You need to keep all these pixel dimensions in mind as you pick the size of print you want for your digital image and your expectations of what your are getting when saving your own or downloading an image.
With all that said, there is a threshold where images are better suited for upscaling. The larger the image the more data and so the larger the image the easier it is to upscale the image and not worry about too much loss in image quality. Our phones are capable of taking 3024px by 4032px; that would make them printable at 10" x 13.5" - do not get too concerned. This is a pretty big file (2-3 Mb) and since it has lots of data, today's resize programs can do a really good job upscaling this size of image to our maximum printing capability. I have a piece I printed on canvas from my cell phone that is 32" x 40" and it looks fantastic. The difference between web images and your cell phone picture or other larger digital image is simply the amount of data that is available for the computer program to interpret the image into a larger format and simply fool the eye that it is clear and sharp image.
Now that you know what to expect with the size of the images you are creating digitally, You can upload, order and print any digital image as long as it isn't too small.
Get your Procreate digital creations, cellphone memories or your own artwork reproduced (like the one we can make of your art when you bring in your original) on Canvas and a variety of papers! I can't wait to see what you send me to reproduce for you.
Cell phone photos | Digital Photos | Digital Paintings | Digitized Painting
Video, click image above...
Here is what I really look like
working on my iPad and Procreate.
Occasionally we have a little fun around here. This is a Facebook Live challenge Jenn (my artner hear at the studio) and myself doing a Bob Ross Challenge... will we own Bob or will Bob own us? Let us know if you want us to do this again!
Located in Fleming Place, 1047 B Gage Blvd., Topeka, KS You can't miss it if you go into the main entrance of the shopping center on Gage.
Studio hours are Tuesday-Friday 10-6 and Saturday 10-1.
But we are open 24/7 online!
