[photolady95]

I need printing. I do not like jpg format but the place I'm going to upload to printed accepts .png. Has anyone used this format for printing and if so, what results do you get?

[Nanthiel]

I don't think the format itself should impact the printing too much. PNG itself is way better than JPEG quality wise, as it's compression is lossless (just like lossless TIFF compression).

[photolady95]

Thanks Nanthiel, I know jpeg is bad for printing, that is why I was looking into png because tiff isn't an accepted file format where I'm going to upload the photos.

[davemdsn]

Jpeg is bad for printing? This is the first I have heard of this. It's really bad for editing, but I hadn't heard bad for printing.

[photolady95]

Depends on how much it's compressed there can be jpeg artifacts in the print. Of course most cameras (re digitals) that use jpg/jpeg are better because the pixel sizes are larger. But older scanned film, turned jpg for the web (72dpi) you wouldn't want to print those. Sorry I didn't think about this idea in the main. I was seeing jpegs printed at 72dpi.

I'm still going print some in png to see how they differ.

If you save to a jpeg at the highest quality it's fine for printing. I've even gone to medium and had wonderful output.

You don't want to open a jpeg work on it then save it back. That's when you save as a tiff or psd and when all is said and done you save a copy as a jpeg

[Marc Sabatella]

Depends on how much it's compressed there can be jpeg artifacts in the print. Of course most cameras (re digitals) that use jpg/jpeg are better because the pixel sizes are larger. But older scanned film, turned jpg for the web (72dpi) you wouldn't want to print those. Sorry I didn't think about this idea in the main. I was seeing jpegs printed at 72dpi.

I'm still going print some in png to see how they differ.

Yeah, I'm guesisng it was the loss of resolution in saving for the web that is the problem here. Sure, in a large enough print, you could take a magnifying glass to it and see JPEG compression artifacts if you knew what to look for. But the loss of resolution if you're saving for web - that's what's jumping out and grabbing you by the throat, not the JPEG compression. A JPEG saved at full resolution at a reaosnable high quality / low compression ratio would be very unlikely to cause any issues you'd notice.

BTW, when I say "full resolution", think in terms of number of pixels, not dpi - the latter does nothing but cause people confusion. "dpi" is relevant when actually performing the can, because it instructs the scanner on how many pixels to collect. But once you've collected the pixels, it becomes irrelevant. If you concentrate on always keeping the number of pixels you've collected, it won't matter what the dpi number in the file says. Printing X pixels at a size of Y inches works out to X/Y dpi, regardless of what the dpi in the file says. It could *say* 4000dpi, but if you've only got enough pixels for 72dpi, then 72dpi is all you'll get. Conversely, it might *say* 72dpi, but if you've got enough pixels for 300dpi, then 300dpi is what you'll get.

In any case, sure, PNG, will give slightly better results than JPEG because its compression is lossless. File sizes are of course correspondingly bigger, and there's no support for most metadata, but neither of those should be issues for images generated for the sole purpose of printing (assuming you are using TIFF as your "native" format).

[photolady95]

Thanks Marc, that was very enlightening. I just saved one at the size pixels 6783x4414 of the original in tiff, to jpeg with pixel size at 5258x3532. The photo is now just over 29mbs, where the original was over 85mbs.

But I need another question answered. On converting jpeg, what percentage of compression do you all use? When I used irfanview I set it for 48%. I don't use this anymore, I use faststone image viewer and the settings in there are completely different, it's not a percentage but a quality setting and I have it set to save at 100% quality.

For my own photos I just print them in the tiff I originally scanned them as. These photos are from a family get together we have ever year, and there are aproximately 100 photos, too much for my wallet to handle to print them here.

[Marc Sabatella]

As far as I know, compression/quality settings are not comparable between programs, and I've never used faststone. But a 29MB file for what appears to be essentially a ~20MP image sounds to me like extraordinarily high quality / low compression - far better than what most people would normally use. On programs that offer a quality scale of 1 to 100, I think around 90 is probably typical. You'd be extermely hard pressed to see any difference except in 100% views on your monitor, and even then it would be subtle. But it would probably cut file size down to well under half what you are seeing now. Although again, if these are just temps for printing, I guess there's no reason to worry too much about file size.

[photolady95]

As far as I know, compression/quality settings are not comparable between programs, and I've never used faststone. But a 29MB file for what appears to be essentially a ~20MP image sounds to me like extraordinarily high quality / low compression - far better than what most people would normally use. On programs that offer a quality scale of 1 to 100, I think around 90 is probably typical. You'd be extermely hard pressed to see any difference except in 100% views on your monitor, and even then it would be subtle. But it would probably cut file size down to well under half what you are seeing now. Although again, if these are just temps for printing, I guess there's no reason to worry too much about file size.

Well, mostly it seems this was all for naught, because we've decided to print them at home on my Epson printer instead of sending them out to be printed. These are just 4x6 family photos for our annual get together, they'll be put in a photo album for future viewing. My own saleable photos are printed elsewhere.

I did learn something though, so my question wasn't a total waste of forum pages.

[kibipod]

Hey photolady,

Would you mind giving us the name of the printing store? I have never thought of png as an alternative of jpeg or tiff while uploading my files for printing. I also have printer at home. So I can play with png a little bit and see if I can detect any difference between jpeg and png at 8X10 size level.

Thanks,
Subho

[photolady95]

Subho, I was going to use CVS the pharmacy store in their photo department. Which they tell me on the website is separate from the main store. I've never used them so can't attest to how good they are.