We have now finished scanning and adjusting a high resolution scan of a medium format B/W negative and wish to save a version of this image for general printing (home printers and colour laser printers or inserting the image in a word document.

1. The first step in setting up our image for printing is to make sure we have the correct image size and resolution/dpi, to do this we open up by the image size adjustment win-dow: Image > Image Size

Ben Dolman - IT Teaching Support - PhotoShop - Saving Images for General Quality Printing - LUSAD - 13 May 2007

PhotoShop Tutorials Saving Images for General Printing

In the Image Size window we can see that the master scan of the B/W negative was scanned at 9200 dpi, dimensions were set at 3000 x 3000 pixels which resulted in a 8.58mb file.

2. We can now put in new sizes for a A4 digital print, first always enter in the target resolu-tion of the print output which is 200 dpi for general quality printing and then enter the de-sired Width and Height sizes of the document. Note after changing the DPI and size the file size will change, in this case the result is 85.3mb.

Ben Dolman - IT Teaching Support - PhotoShop - Saving Images for General Quality Printing - LUSAD - 13 May 2007

Changing the image/document size so it fits onto A4, in this case the image has been re-sized to 20 x 20 cm.

4. After the resolution and image dimensions have been set we can save the image by go-ing to File > Save As

Ben Dolman - IT Teaching Support - PhotoShop - Saving Images for General Quality Printing - LUSAD - 13 May 2007

5. In the Save As window give the file a name, create a new folder to save your file into and choose JPeg format to save your file.

Always give a file and name and make sure you do not remove the file extension be it .psd or .jpeg as if the extension is removed the file cannot always be opened again.

Ben Dolman - IT Teaching Support - PhotoShop - Saving Images for General Quality Printing - LUSAD - 13 May 2007

Creating folders and dating them for your images and projects is considered good practice as it will make archiving and finding work easier in the future.

For general inkjet and laser printing using the JPEG format is fine as these printers would not always produce better results given a larger uncompressed TIFF file which is best used on professional proofing printers. JPEG formatting compresses an image and the re-sulting file size is decreased with little drop in quality making it idea for inserting images in a text document like Word.

Ben Dolman - IT Teaching Support - PhotoShop - Saving Images for General Quality Printing - LUSAD - 13 May 2007

After setting the format and naming the file we can click the save button.

When saving an image in the JPEG format a JPEG options window appears, make sure the Image Options Quality is set to Maximum and 12 for printing output.

Ben Dolman - IT Teaching Support - PhotoShop - Saving Images for General Quality Printing - LUSAD - 13 May 2007

Below are the file mb sizes when one saves a image as a JPEG at 200dpi as opposed to an uncompressed PhotoShop File at 360dpi

Ben Dolman - IT Teaching Support - PhotoShop - Saving Images for General Quality Printing - LUSAD - 13 May 2007