Upscale from 72dpi (1080p film stills) to 150dpi or 300dpi? (booklet print)

#1

I’m curious, cause I’ve been told 300dpi is the standard, and necessary when printing out a small (almost 13cm height) sized booklet, with 1080p stills. I’m 99.9% sure the booklet will be offset printed if it makes any difference?

The source of the stills is 1920x1080 footage (Originally 4k, brought down to 1080p. No chance of going back to 4k sadly). So, here’s the three possibilities I have, and I’m wondering which one is better:

Option 1 - I go with 150dpi. And scale down (to 69%. Meaning a 31% decrease) the 1080p stills to fit the design.

Option 2 - I go with 300dpi. And scale up (to 140%. Meaning a 40% increase) the 1080p stills to fit the design.

Option 3 - I choose a weird dpi number, like 220dpi, so at least I don’t have to scale down the original 1080p stills. But, I’m not sure this will be accepted by the company which will print it, or if it will make a difference.

Option 1 looks the best on my screen obviously. However, if 300dpi is a big difference, then surely the pixels I lost when scaling the stills down 31% to fit the 150dpi design should be a huge loss? Or? But Option 2 looks really bad on my screen. So I’m not sure… I could try BenVista Photozoom to get a better looking image on the screen, but it might change the image drastically when printed?

#2

Just make your images 300 dpi or what the printer requires, if different (which I doubt). Then size them to fit the final art size to fit the brochure layout. Unfortunately it sounds like your images are pretty small, at 72 dpi, and will need to be enlarged by up to 400% (depending on current size and destination size), resulting in a fuzzy mess.

#3

Hi, thanks for the reply!

It’s not a huge print. Only about 14cm height. So I only have to scale the images up an extra 40%. My co-worker is helping me by scaling them up though, using a software called Perfect Resize(?). It actually don’t look that bad on the screen now. There are a few artifacts that can be seen at 100% zoom. But if I zoom out to “print view”, it’s not noticeable at all. I guess I’m going with option 2, 300dpi. Better for everything else anyway (text, graphics).

Will there be a problem if I drag 72dpi images into the 300dpi file? Does one have to convert to 300dpi first in the original file, and then copy it to the new one, or does it not matter?

#4

Here´s a very good and free image resize software.

Smilla enlarger: http://sourceforge.net/projects/imageenlarger/

Here is an example image:

#5

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