DPI troubles

Hi,

My girl-friend studied advertising and started working on her portfolio, hoping to find a job. However, things are not going as smooth as planned.

She spend almost a year on working on her first portfolio. The day it was finished and she wanted to burn everything on a CD, her iMac crashed and all her work was lost.

Now she worked 5-6 months on her second portfolio. Yesterday it was finished. We burned everything on a CD and took it to a print-shop..... the result was hideous : all text and graphics are jagged. When we asked for an explanation, the guy at the print-store said that the images were at 72 DPI and you couldn't get a better print.

My girlfriend now has two options :

- Redesign everything AGAIN (losing again 5 or 6 months).
- start to work as a McDonalds waiter (she 's actually considering this).

Now listen, my girl is way to talented to let do a job at McDonalds. Is there anything that can be done to increase the quality of the prints ?? (the text looks absolutely blocky when printed).


Thanks in advance,


Jeroen Jacobs

I'll take a Big Mac and fries please ;)

In all honesty she is pretty screwed. She should have made her work at the desired resolution in the creation process, it is nigh on impossible to retrograde these things.

Text should always remain vector shapes and not rasterised.

As for the problem she has now. Better get started on a new portfolio. There are programs on the market such a S-Spline and other fractal programs that may be able to go someway to resolving your problem, but in all honesty they are no substition for the corrct resolution before starting work.

What she could do is make a portfolio on CD and provide a small one page print resume. It can't hurt till the new portfolio is made. Also, like thehermit said, you can try a fractal program. Genuine Fractals is pretty amazing. It won't be quite the same, but you could salvage some work.

But time for some brutal truth. She may be an amazing artist and designer. But if she spent a year and a half building a portfolio and never once contacted a printer to talk about the prints or even worse, she had no idea about resolution, she is in no way ready to work in the print world. It's good that the art skills are there, but she will never last if the technical side is that weak. It's a very competitive world, and she'll just get dropped if she doesn't know how to handle and prep her files. What she may want to do is re-study all the important aspects of design that are NOT art related. Then go find a job. No sense creating a bad reputation and correcting it later. Do it now, then come in and wow all potential employers.

unless everything was designed in illustrator and can be re-exported at a different resolution you are pretty much out of luck. the only thought i have would be to try to print them at a smaller physical size at like 150 dpi (i.e. if a piece was designed at 5" x 7" print it at like 2.5" x 3.5"). you wouldn't have perfect prints but they'd be decent for the most part.

chris

Hi,

Thanks for all the feedback guys. She still has all the pictures she took and she decided to start over.

A few notes however :

- My girlfriend DOES know about DPI and all that stuff. She still hitting her head because she overlooked this all the time.
- She 's working on an old macintosh with photoshop 4. It doesn't support cd-writers and her SuperDisk broke down a few months ago too. She cannot afford a printer right now. (Some people DON'T have the luxury to receive a topnotch computer from mommy and daddy on christmas). It's only because I hooked it up to my laptop that we were able to transfer to files to a CD-ROM

Anyway, thanks for all the suggestions :-)


Greetings,


Jeroen

First, I've spent 11 years working on my portfolio, and I just bought myself, my girlfriend, and mommy and daddy's 2nd computer. Skip the offensive jab next time.

Second, you just got some very real, very accurate advice. You should be happy.

Now, if I may...

Option 1: upload it all to a website and skip all the redesign. Email potential employers a link along with putting the link on your girly's resume.

Option 2: make it into PDF's and make each page downloadable from a site or a CD later on.

Option 3: find a way to get your hands on the equipment she needs. (hint: eBay, Mac User Groups, classified ads) With or without a portfolio, your girl needs to know the features that come with Photoshop 5.5, 6, 7, and CS. Not to mention be able to burn a CD afterwards.

You gotta lose the ego here pal, this community will help you a ton if you start with that advice.

Best of luck to you and your girlfriend. I hope you don't get scared off. We welcome new members, believe it or not.

Hi,

To graphicsguy :

I may have reacted a bit harsh on the printer thingy. However, you seem to think that taking all the pics to a printer was a straightforward proces (which it wasn't it this case :-) ).

It was not my intention to insult you or the others on this forum. (My previous message mentions my thanks to everyone).

My girlfriend graduated a year ago (Visual arts), and she's afraid she won't find a job anymore because she hasn't worked in the industry for a year. Combine this with the fact that she lost her portfolio 2x times in a computer-crash and now these printer-problems... well, she's afraid her portfolio will never get finished and she will never find a job in the industry. If you have 11 years of experience, it's a lot easier to find a job. Imagine yourself as you just graduated. The only things you have is a degree and a portfolio with all the stuff you created in school. Now imagine you lost your portfolio and you're only left with a degree. What's the chance of getting a job ? right... zero.

So excuse me if I sounded a bit rude ok ;-)

just an observation after re-reading this: no one is too talented to do a job anywhere while trying to get where they want to be. i did temp work for a year after i graduated from school until i was good enough (and found the right opportunity) to get a job. the market is tough no matter what your experience level, and that may mean working a job during the day to make the ends meet and working on your own stuff at night. i'm actually doing that trying to move into other areas of design that i don't have experience in yet. so it may be mickey d's for a while, doesn't mean she's not going to be a designer. if money is that tight to where things like a printer and other stuff that you really need aren't possible then it might not be a bad idea.

chris

Ok I just learned a new trick.

If you open the files and resize them with Image size to 110% over and over they will usually retain a lot of the original texture. Just keep upping the size by 10% each time and the interpolation will be a lot better...then try a little sharpening to taste.

Good luck!

CryptoManiac

cryptomaniac- i actually had a really crappy scan of a pic... i made it smaller and 110%'d it a bunch of times and it looks better...