Have you ever downloaded an image from the internet and then printed it, only to get results that were, well, less than you expected?
The image looked great on your computer screen, but when you printed it, it either printed at the size of a postage stamp or it printed at a decent size but looked blurry or blocky? The culprit is image resolution.
Actually, that’s not really fair to say. Image resolution didn’t purposely set out to make your life miserable when you printed your internet photo. The problem was simply that most photos on the internet have very small pixel dimensions, usually in the neighborhood of 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels high or even smaller, and that’s because images don’t need to be very large in order to appear at a decent size and good quality on your computer screen, and also because smaller images download much faster on websites than larger images do.
SendOutCards has very high quality printers, and so they have the ability to overcome a lot of this problem. But if the pixels just aren’t there, it can be very difficult to get a great image on your card.
So as you’re looking at images to use for your cards, here are the recommended image size in pixels for a greeting card:
Vertical Greeting Cards are 5″ x 7″. The recommended bleed is half an inch, so the best pixel size is 1650 x 2250 for a greeting card, 3300 x 2250 for a full-span 2-panel card, and 4950 x 2250 for a full-span 3-panel card.
Horizontal Greeting Cards are 7″ x 5″. With the recommended bleed of half an inch, the best pixel size is 2250 x 1650for a greeting card, 2250 x 3300 for a full-span 2-panel card, and 2250 x 4950 for a full-span 3-panel card.
As mentioned above, SendOutCards does have some amazing printers. I have used images as low as 1000 pixels on their longest side and still had great results. I wouldn’t go smaller than that. But remember, there is no guarantee. For best results, be sure to use the highest resolution photos you can find.
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Let’s have some conversation!
EXPECT Success!
By Lynn Huber
p.s. The better quality the original image, the better quality your card will be!
