Print is soft or fuzzy
Problem
The picture seems 'soft' and doesn't have much detail.
Run your cursor over the buttons to see print versions with increasing levels of crispness and detail. Look at areas like the girl's hair and the guinea pig's nose. (These prints may appear to 'jump' a bit as you move from one to the other; the reason can be found in About Prints.)
What should you look for?
Your first reaction may be that the picture is out of focus. Lack of focus prevents the camera from recording the details that make a picture interesting and, most importantly, lifelike. With an automatic camera, however, pictures are less often "unfocused" than "mis-focussed" – the camera has chosen the wrong thing to focus on. If this picture were mis-focussed, you'd probably have an unfocused girl with sharp background leaves (more on mis-focus...).
Everything is equally soft here, so the problem is not focus. Assuming that the picture looked sharp on screen and that other prints from your printer have been satisfactory, all-over softness points to a print that doesn't have enough information to be sharp and lifelike.
To see how changes in resolution affect a photo, roll your mouse over the buttons beside the photo of the girl.
- At 60 ppi, her jacket is generic blue cloth and her hair has an undefined aura around it. The guinea pig's eye is dull.
- At 90 ppi, the jacket has acquired some texture and the aura has become a multitude of windblown strands of hair. The guinea pig's eye is brighter.
- At 200 ppi, we can see the nubbly quality that identifies the blue cloth as polar fleece, a long tendril of hair has appeared across the girl's left cheek and the guinea pig has gained some whiskers.
Because the prints from which these images were scanned carry much finer detail than a computer screen, the differences between 60 ppi and 200 ppi are more dramatic in print than on the screen. On screen, the differences between 200 ppi and 300 ppi are almost invisible. In print, they are present mostly as subtle differences in the modeling of the girl's face. Some of this subtlety is visible in a 250% enlargement of the girl's and guinea pig's faces.
Run your cursor over the buttons to see versions with increasing levels of crispness and detail. Again, look at the hair, the guinea pig's nose and the texture of the girl's fleece pullover. In the higher-resolution shots, you'll see the detail that lends realism to the photo.
What should you do?
First, verify that the problem is really low resolution. For a photo to print properly, a print resolution of between 300 and 200 pixels per inch (ppi) will certainly give good results. 300 ppi will give you good results on almost any image, while 200 ppi works well for many – but this can be quite subjective. Aside from personal preference, the determining factor is the picture content.
- A photo of, for instance, a royal court dress that you saw in a museum or a piece of delicate jewelry may respond better to 300 ppi, because the point of the picture was to record the incredible fine detail, so viewers will examine the photo closely.
- A photo you snapped to show a holiday beach, on the other hand, is only meant to be seen as a general sensation – as long as viewers come away awed by the sea, the sand and the palm trees, the fine details are largely irrelevant.
To find out what the resolution of your problem picture is, go back to your image-editing application and open the file from which you printed the picture. Go to the dialog used to resize the picture – in Photoshop Elements, this is Image >> Resize >> Image Size. In Photoshop Elements, the upper part of the dialog gives the pixel dimensions. You can approach this with a view to finding out the maximum size at which you can make a good print, or to find out what the resolution would be at the size of the print you're after.
In the example dialog below, the file is 798 by 1200 pixels If you decide that you must print at 300 ppi, then the maximum print size will be 4 inches high (1200 / 300 = 4). By lowering your target print resolution to 220 ppi, you can stretch that to almost 5.5 inches (1200 / 220 = 5.45). If the subject is not too detail-oriented, that's probably worth a trial print.
The upper portion of the Image Size dialog shows your photo's dimensions in pixels, while the lower portion allows you to set the size at which the photo will print. Note that the three variables are linked (the bracket and chain icon at right), so a change in any one of these numbers will change the other two. By typing '250' into the Resolution box, you can see how large a print can be made at this resolution. Conversely, by typing '5' into the Height box, you can quickly find out what the resolution would be at this print size (240 pixels per inch – enough for a photo whose detail won't be closely examined).
It's important to remember that this dialog only changes the photo's pixel dimensions when the Resample Image box is checked. The issues raised by resampling are dealt with here.
In Photoshop Elements as in most imaging apps, you can also use the Document Size portion of the dialog to get the same info – after you enter '6 inches' beside Height, the Resolution pane will show 200 pixels/inch. Note that the Resample Image checkbox must not be checked for the dialog to operate this way.
Using this type of dialog with the Resample Image checkbox checked is covered in About Resizing Photos I – How.
NB: Don't assume that because 300 ppi makes a good image, that 400 ppi or more will make a better image. Many programs will automatically downsample a file before printing if it's over 300 ppi and the results can be unpredictable (for starters, you don't get a chance to set an appropriate level of sharpening). This may also be true if you let your program resize a photo to fit the paper size (Photoshop and Photoshop Elements have a checkbox in the print dialog called 'Scale to fit media'). Set your photo to the correct size before you start to print and make sure it looks the way you want.
How do you fix it?
Unless you have the opportunity to re-shoot the photo at greater pixel dimensions, your options are limited.
The simplest option is to print the picture at a size that is more appropriate to the original image. Most photographic advice will tell you to print at 300 ppi. But as you can see from the picture of the girl and guinea pig, the difference between 200 ppi and 300 ppi for this type of picture is subtle, so 200 ppi may work for you. Sometimes you can get away with a lower number.
The next option is to increase the file's size by resampling (see About the Printable Size of Photos, About Resizing Photos I – How and About Resizing Photos II – Why), then fool the viewer a bit with sharpening. Keep in mind that resampling only makes the picture bigger – it doesn't create the detail that would have been present if you'd shot the original at that size. Pictures that rely on detail for their effect may not have the same impact if resampled to a larger size.
