It's happened to all of us at one time or another. You design something, it looks great on your screen, you get it back from your printer and... ugh! Your beautiful design has blurry, jagged-looking photos. What happened? More importantly, how do you make it NOT happen? In this article I'll walk you through the science of how image resolution works in print and on-screen to answer both of those questions. So you'll understand why your photos are blurry and learn how to prevent it from happening to you again. Let's dig in.

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For more than a century (since 1901) Casey Printing  has been helping northern California publishers print magazines and catalogs. For this reason we feel uniquely qualified to offer insights into printing resources in this area. Our customers have come to trust our judgement, so occasionally, when there is a project that does not fit our services for one reason or another, we are asked to suggest other sources of printing.

If you've ever looked very closely at something printed on an commercial offset press, you may have noticed that the images and colors you see on paper are not what they seem. The reds are not really reds, and the blues not blues. Instead they are combinations of dots that, when seen adjacent to one another in tight groupings, give the appearance of solid colors and images. This process is known as halftoning, and it is an essential technique for all modern printing.