Image resolution is for for PRINT, telling a printer how many dots per inch the ink needs to touch down. There's a big difference between resolution needed to PRINT an image, and the resolution needed for an image to display properly on screen.

It's ok, we were too.Īnd while you weren't doing any harm, you were probably unaware of what exactly 'saving for web” was actually doing, and what makes an image optimized for web.

Raise your hand if you have you been using Photoshop's 'Save For Web' feature all these years thinking it was dropping the resolution to 72 DPI. Who ever told you to do that is an idiot! SO, the idea that you should set your images' resolutions to 72 DPI in this day and age is just silly, and completely unnecessary. So the computer monitor you're currently staring at, unless it was made before yours truly was born, has a resolution that is much higher than 72 DPI. Some smartphones even display at up to 500 dpi. Monitors these days, especially Apple's retina displays, have much greater resolutions, commonly 227 DPI. Literally no one uses 72 ppi resolution monitors anymore. As screens and printers have improved, the 72 DPI rule for web resolution is now completely irrelevant. In the 1980's, computer screens did have resolutions of 72 DPI, it was because dot matrix printers printed at 144 DPI, so what you saw on the screen was going to be roughly equal to what was printed on a 2 to 1 scale. An image's resolution will have no effect on how it appears on your screen. So with apologies to all the friends, colleagues, and clients that we have spread this misinformation to, here is some new, reliable knowledge… Saving images 'for web' has nothing to do with saving them at 72 DPI (or ppi, pixels per inch) resolution. Recently we read something about web graphics, something that we should have already known, something that makes sense once you internalize it… image resolution is for print, not web. '72 DPI is the highest resolution that monitors can show, so make all your images for web 72 DPI and it will reduce file size!” Sound familiar? It does to use, because for years we were instructed, asked, and even begged for clients to save their images at 72 DPI.

Photoshop 72 dpi how to change