Image Quality

A major thing i notice a fair bit both in web and print design is the lack of adequate image quality. Image quality is incredibly important as the difference in reaction to seeing a beautiful, clear picture and trying to decipher what those blurs are supposed to be is phenomenal.

Some key points to remember:

Print Design (Business cards, flyers, book covers etc)

• Images in CMYK
• DPI (Dots per inch) set at 300, or 150 for newspaper designs.
• Always have a bleed if your images are going to the edge of the design (make the image go over the edge by atleast 5mm

Web Design

• Images in RGB
• DPI can be set at anything from 72 upwards (not neccessary for higher than 72 in most cases)
• Save for Web and Devices; For images that are going to be a part of a website, make sure you save for web and devices (ctrl+shift+alt+S in photoshop), this will reduce the file size drastically, but mkae sure you also save a hardcopy (PSD, JPG etc) as the web and devices version will not open in preview etc.

I’ll leave you on this note, remember reducing an image’s size is fine, and will retain most of its quality, however INCREASING the size of an image can become problematic if there are not enough pixels (usually happens at 72 DPI), so always make your original image much larger than need be, then save smaller versions of it.