EOS Rebel T7 How to take photos at 300 dpi

[Redsed]

I am just learning how to take photos of my artwork to post on a marketing site. I am told I have to post a min. 300 DPI photo which means I need to change my settings and photograph all my artwork...again.  Can someone give me a simplified explanation about how to do that. Sorry if this sounds a little crazy but I have put myself in a position to learn every. single. thing. about websites and social media and cameras all at once.  If I can just take the right pictures I will be miles ahead of where I am now. There are plenty of tutorials about what to put the setting on when you start out but not what any of those settings actually mean.  Thank you so much for any information. 

[Anonymous]

The DPI is only applicable when printing a photo. It is dependent on the resolution of the photo and the size of the print. To assign a minimum DPI to a photograph file that hasn't been printed yet, is meaningless. Typically, Canon cameras put a 72 DPI rating in out of camera files. It means nothing, as it is the DPI value if you printed the image at full size, which would be huge in size. In your printing software, the DPI value will increase with a smaller print size. The smaller the print, the larger the DPI value. If you have your camera set to its highest resolution, you shouldn't have to worry about the DPI value when taking the photo, it is the printing software settings that affect the DPI setting.

[Anonymous]

As an example, my camera produces a photo with a resolution of 6720 x 4480 with DPI value of 72. If I print the image at 72 DPI the image size will be 93.33 in. (6720/72 = 93.33) by 62.22 in. (4480/72 = 62.22). If I print the image at 300 DPI the print will be a 22.4 in. by 14.9 in. in size. So you can see the DPI is dependent on the image resolution and the desired size of the print.

[shadowsports]

In addition to Bob's detailed explanation 😃, ensure you are shooting in RAW format.  This allows the most creative flexibility.  You can use Canon's free Digital Photo Professional to edit, correct/enhance your images, and convert them to an easy to print, post format.  

Canon Support for EOS Rebel T7 | Canon U.S.A., Inc.

Its available for Windows or Mac OS

We'll be here to help 😃

[Redsed · Accepted solution]

This is what I'm looking at from my marketing company. 

[Redsed]

Wouldn't let me copy/paste but here's what they said. If you're Starting with photographs of your art, you can determine roughly how large you can print your images using this chart. Just find the resolution of your image , then compare it with the height and width to get a rough estimate of the print size at 300 dpi. 

My problem is that I cannot find the settings for my camera to shoot at 300dpi. 

[Anonymous]

There are no settings in the camera to shoot at 300 DPI. Your camera can record up to 6000 x 4000 pixels in L JPEG or L RAW. That is the highest resolution that your camera can provide. There is no DPI setting in the camera. The largest photo that you can print at 300 DPI is 6000/300 = 20 inches by 4000/300 = 13.3 inches. How large of a print in inches do you require? That will tell you the DPI of your print, by using the formula below.

Pixels divided by inches = DPI
or
Pixels divided by DPI = inches

So you can see it is dependent on the number of pixels and the desired print size. The only setting in the camera that affects DPI is the resolution that you select in your camera's settings. Choose Large (L) JPEG or (L) RAW to allow for the largest prints.

 

[rs-eos]

The marketing site would need to at least provide one other value.  Just providing a 300 DPI value is not enough information.  e.g. that value implies you could submit a 300 x 300 pixel image that would print out as 1-inch square.

The site should additionally be providing either a resolution (width and height) or a physical size (width and height in inches).

Once you have the two values, you can then provide the necessary images.  e.g. if they want you to submit 8 x 10 inch photos at 300 DPI, that would mean you'd need images with a resolution of 2400 x 3000.

[Redsed]

But how do I set my camera to get that resolution? They want me to have every photo at 300dpi to be able tto print several different sizes of prints. 

[johnrmoyer]

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@Redsed wrote:

But how do I set my camera to get that resolution? They want me to have every photo at 300dpi to be able tto print several different sizes of prints. 

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Since your camera produces an image that is 6000x4000 pixels, if you are able to exactly use all of that resolution then you could sell a print up to 20 inches by 13.3 inches at 300 dpi. If you want to sell a larger print, then you could use a program such as hugin to stitch together several photos as if you were making a panorama.

I guess that the 300dpi might be a minimum and that the marketing company will scale the image before printing it because it does not make sense to me that they would want you to upload a separate image file for each print size. But, if you have a 6000x4000 photo and want to sell a 10 inch by 6.67 inch print by uploading exactly 300 dpi you might use the free to download Canon Digital Photo Professional software to save at any resolution you might wish, in this case 3000x2000 pixels. Canon Digital Photo Professional would also be willing to put the 300dpi number into the meta data when saving. In Canon Digital Professional one can set the units for resize to "inch" along with 300dpi and the software will do the arithmetic for you.