Rant: Resolution Confusion

I was never so happy as when the art world finally gave up its Luddite adherence to the rule that all images for art shows and galleries must be submitted on 35mm slides! They were not the last to join the digital revolution by a long shot (have you peeked into the records room at your doctor’s office?) but it made the lives of artists so much easier.

That said, all we have to do now is get art professionals to list correct submission guideline! Rare is the week that I don't email a show organizer to tell them that their guidelines for art image files are useless (though, I’m always much more diplomatic than that!) To be fair, describing this sort of thing in a way that a non-digitally-minded person can understand is difficult.

Here is the problem: The terms “dpi” (dots per inch), and “resolution” are meaningless as a guideline unless they are paired with a physical dimension in inches (or millimeters.) An image that is the size of a postage stamp can be 300dpi, and so can one that is the size of a bed sheet. What “dpi” means is simply, how many pixels would you count in one inch of an image if you slapped a ruler on top of it.

There are 2 solutions to these error-prone guidelines:
1) If you want to tell people a dots-per-inch measure (even my mother, who is in her 70s and a wonderful painter, has heard of dpi) you must also list a picture size. This is acceptable: “All images submitted must be 300dpi and approximately 4 inches by 6 inches in size.” See? You're telling people that if you make your image 4 inches in the short direction, and the resolution of your image is set to 300dpi, then you will be submitting an image that has 1200 pixels counted along the short dimension. 4 inches times 300 dots (pixels) per inch equals 1200 pixels.

2) I prefer to forget about “dpi” and “resolution” altogether. These terms are confusing. Tell artists that the longest dimension of their image(s) should be between 1000 and 1200 pixels, or between something and something. All they have to do is get their image to a pixel length that falls in that range and they’re golden.

That’s all the ranting I have time for today. I've got to submit some images to a show. Now, they say 300dpi. So, do they want a postage stamp or a laptop-screen-sized image? Hmmmmmmm. I’m going to guess...