Professional Photo Printing Brisbane

DPI Explained: Will My Photo Look Sharp Printed This Big?

Every digital photo is a grid of tiny coloured squares called pixels — a 12-megapixel phone photo has around 12 million of them. Print small, and those pixels sit packed in tight where your eye can't tell they're there. Print big, and the same pixels get stretched across more paper — so the exact same photo can look perfectly sharp at one size and a little soft at another.

We measure this as DPI — dots per inch, or really just how many of your photo's pixels land in each inch of paper. The moment you upload a photo and choose a size, our tool works this out for your actual photo and shows a simple green, amber or red rating: 200 DPI or higher is excellent, and anything down to about 120 DPI still looks perfectly good. You'll only see a warning if a size would genuinely come out blurry.

If you'd like to check this yourself before exporting, the maths is straightforward: take your image's pixel dimensions after cropping (most editing software shows this in the crop or export panel), and divide by your intended print size in inches. For example, a photo cropped to 4000×3000 pixels, printed at 20×15″, gives 4000÷20 = 200 DPI — an "excellent" rating in our tool. The key is to always calculate from your final cropped pixel dimensions, not your camera's original file size — cropping tighter into the frame leaves fewer pixels to cover the same print area, so it lowers your effective DPI even though the original photo hasn't changed.

Here's the part most people don't expect: a print made for a wall is viewed from much further away than a print held in your hand, so it doesn't need nearly as much detail to look sharp. A photo that's only borderline at 8×10″ up close can look completely crisp as a 24×36″ poster hanging across the room, simply because your eye is standing further back from it.

These are the sizes where a photo scores "excellent" in our upload tool. Prints made for a wall are often still a great choice above that, since they're viewed from further away — our tool checks your actual photo and tells you exactly what it can do.

Editing in 16-bit? Don't Flatten It to JPEG Before You Send It

Quick clarification: your camera doesn't actually shoot TIFF. It shoots JPEG (processed and compressed at 8-bit, straight out of the camera) or RAW (the untouched sensor data — usually 12-bit or 14-bit). TIFF only comes into it once you've edited that RAW file and are exporting a finished copy.

Here's the part that surprises most photographers: even though your RAW file is only 12 or 14-bit, your editing software works in 16-bit — on purpose. Every adjustment — exposure, shadows, gradients, colour grading — is maths done on your image, and doing that maths in a bigger 16-bit space keeps it smooth. Without that extra room to work with, heavy edits can leave visible banding in skies, shadows and skin tones. Not because your camera missed any detail — because the file got squeezed too hard somewhere along the way.

Export that finished edit as a JPEG, and it's flattened straight back down to 8-bit and compressed — some of the precision you just protected gets thrown away. Export it as a 16-bit TIFF instead, and it stays exactly as you left it. Nothing flattened. Nothing recompressed.

What that means for you:

• Smoother gradients — skies, shadows, and skin tones print the way they looked in your edit, with no banding.
• More accurate colour — our lab works from everything you protected in your edit when matching your file to the paper you've chosen, not a flattened copy of it.
• Nothing lost between your edit and your wall — from upload to final print, nothing is discarded.

You don't need to do anything extra. Just export your edit as a 16-bit TIFF and upload it as-is — no need to convert it to JPEG first. We handle it exactly as you sent it.

TIFF files are larger than JPEGs, so uploads may take a little longer — worth it for a print that's truer to what you actually edited.