Artstation prints

[N-drju]

Hello Guys,

Good morning for some, good afternoon for others. It's been a while since my last visit to the forum. Been quite a hectic time for me.  Now I need your expertise.

I wonder if you could be so kind and help a begginer-artist-aspiring-pro like me to understand a little better how I should prepare my renders to be accepted by the Artstation print "policy". There are several points that confuse me... As a reminder, here are the Artstation's requirements:

1. JPG (lossless, 100%) or PNG
2. RGB only - Don't convert your files to CMYK
3. Use sRGB color profile (important, please read below)
4. 300 pixels per inch (see below if upscaling images)
5. Maximum file size 100MB
6. Avoid unnecessary texts and letterboxing on the image (see below)

Now, here are the points I really have tough time understanding... 

1. (Clear)
2. Terragen renders are RGB by default, are they? Also, does resaving the output .tiff as .png or .jpg runs any risk of an inadverent conversion to CMYK?
3. How do I make sure that an image has an sRGB color profile? Or is it done by default when saving as .png or .jpeg? The problem is, I do not use Photoshop (I can't afford it) so...
4. I get the calculation method, but just want to make sure. If I want to offer a 20x11.25 inch image, does that mean that the render should be 6000x3450 px?
5. (Clear)
6. (Clear)

I'm sorry to bother you like that, I'm sure these are quite basic questions... For my defense, I can only say that these requirements have taken me by surprise. Then again, I do understand that something that looks good in your social circle may be too little for a demanding customer... In any case I'll be really grateful if you could help me better understand how I should prepare my work for print!

[WAS]

2. and 3.) Under Project Settings hit up the Colour Management tab.
4. I believe that's DPI of the image. 300 DPI is usual low base for print. Not positive.

It is weird they wouldn't allow CMYK considering most printing methods use CMYK such as Office Depot, Fedex and Copy Print. I always thought CMYK was literally based on print colour profiles.

[N-drju]

2. and 3.) Under Project Settings hit up the Colour Management tab.
4. I believe that's DPI of the image. 300 DPI is usual low base for print. Not positive.

It is weird they wouldn't allow CMYK considering most printing methods use CMYK such as Office Depot, Fedex and Copy Print. I always thought CMYK was literally based on print colour profiles.

Colour Management - check. Should be there, even in my free program. If not, a weekly Photoshop sub.

They explicitly mention pixels per inch.

[Dune]

2: yes, no
3. I think sRGB is default
4. yes

[N-drju]

2: yes, no
3. I think sRGB is default
4. yes

Cool. That clears my mind considerably. Thank you.

What I wonder though is whether only some fixed aspect ratios mentioned here are allowable? Or can I just add any aspect ratio I wish as long as the 300 PPI requirement is fulfilled? What about the popular 16:9 for example?

Does anyone have any experience when it comes to that? (I have actually sent them an e-mail too. The more sources, the better. )

[Dune]

If they don't specify ratios, I'd think it's the artist's decision. But that's my opinion.

[sboerner]

What I wonder though is whether only some fixed aspect ratios mentioned here are allowable? Or can I just add any aspect ratio I wish as long as the 300 PPI requirement is fulfilled? What about the popular 16:9 for example?

You should ask about this. Standard print sizes are different from video, and the sizes listed here may be the only ones that they offer.

If you save your files as tiffs the color profile should be set to sRGB.

For a less expensive alternative to Photoshop you might check out Affinity Photo. The license is very inexpensive (and is not a subscription) and the application is very full-featured. At the very least you will be able to check the color profile and ppi for your images, and also resave them as jpegs which will make it easier to send the images by email, etc.

Good luck! Please let us know how it works out.

[WAS]

They explicitly mention pixels per inch.

Pretty sure it's the same thing. Where PPI is monitor/digital based, DPI is physical/print. The pixel in a digital image is equivalent to a dot in a printed picture. I know of no way to set "PPI" in any image editor, because they use DPI/Resolution. PPI is usually set on scanners, when scanning something physical.

Also GIMP is still free, and has better features than PS currently it seems outside gimmicky stuff like 3D mode.

[sboerner]

The pixel in a digital image is equivalent to a dot in a printed picture.

This is definitely not true.


You are right in that DPI is used to describe the resolution of output devices, but that is different from image resolution or PPI. A 300-ppi image can be printed on a 1200-dpi laser printer, for example, or output as an offset plate using a 2400-dpi imagesetter. But it's still a 300-ppi image in PS or any other application.

Not to be confused with either of these terms is lines per inch, which measures the resolution of the halftone screens used to reproduce continuous tone images in print. 

The final quality of the printed output is determined by the relationship between these three values. 300 ppi is the standard adopted across the industry because it is is a good base level resolution that works well with many output devices and halftone screen sizes.

[WAS]

I'm sorry, but if you document resolution is 72 (default for PS for example), your DPI is 72. Both Pixel Resolution and Dots Per Inch. There's no other way to define it because they are equivalents in different mediums, digital based on pixels and physical images based on pixels rendered as dots. That's why your only settings are pixels/inch pixels/cm because this is relating to physical dimensions.

A 300 ppi would be the scale for a scanner translating to digital medium. Having the scanner scale differently is irrelevant.

That's why you don't see a difference in digital, because this is data for print.

As a matter of fact, walking into FedEx and giving them a file they'll ask if it's at least 300 DPI for printing, you set this with Resolution and PPI. For example basic 72 resolution image would be a blur fest due to printing scaling, or come out miniature (to respect the files resolution scale).

[Kadri]

Jordan, sboerner is right. This is an old confusing thing that comes up every time.
"DPI has nothing to do with anything displayed digitally! And this is where a lot of the confusion occurs."
From here:
https://photographylife.com/dpi-vs-ppi

Short information direct from Sony for example:
https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00027623

There was a good page many years ago. If i can find it i will post it here.

[Kadri]

Found it:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,10040.msg104639.html#msg104639

[sboerner]

Thanks for the links, Kadri.

Jordan, the problem is that for years people have used the expressions ppi and dpi interchangeably. When I started in the graphic design business (many moons ago) the dominant term was dpi for all uses. People still confuse the two, despite the fact that vendors such as Adobe and Sony have made a concerted effort to distinguish between them and to educate people on the difference. And it's an important difference. PPI is for virtual resolution, DPI is for hardware resolution.

I guarantee you that the printer you use at Fedex is not a 300-dpi device. That would result in terrible quality. They require a 300-ppi image because the (virtual) pixels need to be small enough to provide at least one pixel per halftone dot. The halftone dots themselves, in the output device, are formed from several -- sometimes many -- hardware dots. The finer the output dpi, the higher halftone screen you can use, and the higher the quality.

The reason you get terrible quality with a 72 dpi image is because the virtual pixels, enlarged to fit the output size, now overlap many halftone dots and become visible, creating a pixelated and blurry image.

I work with these numbers every day, and have always insisted that clients provide 300-ppi, RGB images. Sometimes that's a battle, because the importance of image resolution can be very, very difficult to explain to laypeople.

[WAS]

Usual basic fundamental misunderstandings, like usual.

DPI is literally dots per inch in spacial printing. Nothing today is rendering images [in digital space] using DPI, unless you're on archaic hardware for old monitors, which were ironically approximating print (ever notice how your old CRT mimicked printed text?). Like I've already said, PPI is used as a conversion for DPI to set the scale on paper (printing). PPI/DPI does NOTHING to the actual image, not even in rendering hardware unless you're on archaic computers and monitors approximating DPI. This is why it's Resoltuion/PPI on computers because it literally is a digital photo. There is no such thing as DPI in this realm.

However, printers don't even use 1:1 DPI and print at much smaller scales, but PPI is still used to calculate the DPI for Printing (mind you, this is what we're talking about, printing with art station; where your PPI of 300 equals the base 300 DPI of common printing).

In Scanning DPI is 1:1 still, where DPI is especially crucial. For example 300 is actually pretty noisy, and would provide a bad scan of art, good for smaller books. The PPI of this physical printed file at 300 DPI scanned will be 300.

To set a PPI of 300, for them to handle for the PRINTER to print in DPI ratio (calculated much smaller than 1:1), you set the Document Resolution to 300. That's what he has to do.

---

Additionally, the reason FedEx does this is because if you hand them a JPEG at 72 DPI, and tell them to print a poster, you'll end up with a blur show. Because they scale up with the print (to your requested size). If you don't scale the image it would be forced to render at scale, which is 72 dots per inch, resulting in a drastically smaller image than the poster you intended.

For example the image below simulates this effect, which is why the 72 dpi is blown up.

[Kadri]

Classic Jordan

You don't have even read those links most probably.
But here another one:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,24460.msg248514.html#msg248514

If you still not change your mind this is for you then (sorry for some grammar errors in there...):
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,24465.msg248542.html#msg248542



There was 10-15 years ago a print guy in the Adobe forums that insisted like you and wrote and wrote and wrote...
Then he deleted all his post (i think) and vanished.