Why is PrintMaster reducing better than my Photoshop!!!

[tillthen]

I have Elements 4.0. I open up a 8meg, jpeg that is 35x45 inches. I reduce image size in photoshop and all detail is lost as it is super blurred.

I open the same jpg, in an ancient version of printmaster, and I can resize with the corner arrow and not loose any detail when I go down to 2.75x (whatever the other dimen. is)!!!

I even triead dragging the resized crisp image from Printmaster to Photoshop, only to have the crisp item turn to blurr.

How is it that this is so????

jpg res=72

[Rmpl]

How are you reducing image size in adobe? There could be some setting that's messing things up. Look very carefully at everything.

[tillthen]

Friday I spent 4 hours on the phone with an "adobe tech Expert". Who couldn't get Elements 4.0 to load on her sytem, but kept reading from a book to me, and in the end told me that Her PS was reducing fine, so mine should be fine. Blah, blah, blah. She told me to load it on another computer and if it didn't reduce that I was the program.

So today I loaded it onto another system and sure enough it did the same thing. Seeing as I need to redo a 24 page wedding album by Mon a.m. I went out and purchased 5.0.

And low and behold, it did the same. So after playing around with it here is what I've come up with....

Please advise me if this is the best way.

1) I took my original photo (35x45) and increased the resolution from 72 to 600, and scaled it done to the size I needed. In this case 3x4.

2) I the created my 10x10 page and set it's resolution to 600. This printed a picture with no blur.

3) When I increased the resolution of both to 1000, it looked fine on the screen but when I printed it. It looked like the printer was throwing to much ink to the paper.

I don't know if this would also occur when I take the files to my photo lab?????

My delima is How do I keep my background photos which have great print resolution at 72 dpi, and then drop my 3'inch images on top that have 600 dpi???

How come my 35x45 photos can be perfect at 72 dpi, but when I reduce then to 3x5's I have to increase my resolution??? It seems backwards

[tillthen]

To reduce I'm going under image resize and changing the stats there. I have all 3 boxes checked and resample is set to "bicubic"

[Rmpl]

It's all rather mysterious to me. I can't identify anything you might be doing wrong. I don't know a lot about printing things but 600 dpi sounds really high and unneccesary. Also, you mentioned that you're increasing the resolution of the photos. Unless I'm missing something, I don't think there's any reason to do that. Once you've taken the picture there's no way to get extra detail and no benefit to increasing the resolution. That might be causing problems but I could be wrong about that. Also, I don't know if this is an option in elements, but in regular Photoshop in the image size window there's an option for "Bicubic Sharper" instead of just "Bicubic" -- you might try that if you haven't already. I'm sorry you're having so much trouble. Sounds like a pain.

[tillthen]

On increasing the resolution

When I downsize the 72 dpi photo the place it on the 72 dpi page or canvas. The photo becomes horribly pixelated.

If I take that same photo and increase the resolution and increase the page resolution then when I downsize the photo it doesn't loose the quality.

I'm scaling down from 35x45 to 3inches

[Medley]

I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were printing these. I can help, but I need to know a few things first:

1) The width of your display, in inches. I DO NOT want the diagonal measurement (which most manufacturers advertise), just the width. The best way to find this is by getting out the ruler/tape measure. And I only want the width of the display, not the whole monitor.

2) The display resolutions available to your monitor: 1024x768, 1152x720, etc....

3) Is the printer you're using an Epson? It's not that they're better or worse than other printers, just that they use a different native resolution.

Give me an answer to these questions, and I'll show you how to make prints that look like they came from a professional photographer.

-Medley.

[tillthen]

10inches is the width 10 inches is the height

Lexmark z705 printer

display resolution= 1024x768

color= 32bit highest quality

[Medley]

If you have the capability to change your display resolution to 800x600 this will be more accurate, but:

Open your image in Photoshop

Go to Image> Image Size. Uncheck the "reample image" box and change resolution to 300 ppi. The native resolution of Lexmark printers is right around 300 dpi. So if you send an image to the printer at 600 ppi, it's going to downsize it to around 300 ppi anyway, to meet it's needs. Changing the resolution to 300 ppi ensures that you see the image the same way the printer does.

Change the magnification to 25% view.

This is a fairly accurate indication of what the image will look like when printed. Any sharpening or other modifications should be done at this magnification, so that you can see the effect on the printed image.

This should improve the quality of the prints dramatically.

- Medley.