If you’re printing on an inkjet printer at home, your resolution should fall somewhere between 240 and 480 ppi if you’re using glossy or matte paper, or 180 and 240 ppi for regular or textured paper. This involves increasing the resolution beyond that at which your camera was set (typically 72 or 150 ppi, depending on the model and manufacturer). The goal in printing is to make the pixels too small to be seen individually (otherwise the print will look blocky). The next number refers to pixel size and, as discussed in our image resolution primer, resolution is the measurement that controls it. When printing one photo per page, your document size is most often the same as your paper size. To begin, you need two numbers: document (or rather, print) size and resolution. Happily, the steps are exactly the same in either program. In this article, you’ll learn how to resize those big images from your digital camera for print using Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. While most image editing programs are happy to resize your photo for you in their respective print dialog boxes, knowing how to do it yourself gives you more control.

These days, shooting in your camera’s highest quality mode can yield an image bigger than your printer can actually print. As the quality of digital cameras goes up, so does the volume of pixels they can capture.