Will my photo print sharp?

Print sharpness comes down to how many dots (pixels) land in each inch of the finished print, called DPI. We take your photo's pixel size and divide it by the size you're ordering to get the real DPI at that size.

The DPI you need depends on how far away the piece is seen from. A card in your hand needs about 300. A 6 ft photo board is looked at from several feet back, and from there the eye simply cannot resolve that much detail, so around 50 DPI already looks sharp and anything above that is bonus. The bigger the piece, the farther back people stand, and the lower the DPI it needs. That is why we grade every size against its own bar instead of holding a 6 ft board to the same standard as a greeting card. Floor graphics are a special case: a big dance floor is still viewed from standing height, not from across the room, so floors use one fixed scale no matter their size.

We print your file exactly as you send it. We cannot add resolution to a photo, so if it is too small for the size you want, the fix is a higher resolution copy of that same photo, usually the original straight from the camera or phone. This checker tells you the exact pixel size to look for, so you can test any version of the photo here before you send it. PDFs are handled a little differently: a design made in a program prints sharp at any size, while a PDF built around a photo is only as sharp as that photo.