Expert: Kamal Krishna - 10/29/2009

Question
I am a beginning photographer and have encountered a new problem that probably has a simple answer.  I have my camera settings on 'large' jpeg and imported them all and saved them on an external hardrive.  I'm working on someone else's mac computer and I then opened up a couple in photoshop and went to see the image size and it is showing up at 72 dpi but around 40" wide!  I've never seen this happen.  I am editing these photographs for a client and they need to be able to print them at least at a 8x10 size.  And since everything i've ever known is 72 is for web only am i totally screwed or is there maybe a preference setting that is importing them as a 72 dpi?  Because correct me if I'm wrong, but you cannot increase the dpi number or it will stretch and pixelate the picture correct?

thanks for any feedback!

Jenae

Answer
Hi Jenae,
There's nothing wrong with the importing settings or with the camera settings.

You can try this trick for your output.

create a new canvas in photoshop of 8x10 size with 300dpi.
then drag your photograph onto this canvas. The image will definitely be bigger.
Now using the 'free transform' (cntrl+t) resize the photograph so that it fits the 8x10 canvas.
Decreasing the size will never pixelate the image. Hence this is ready for printing.

do let me know for further clarifications.

- Kamal Krishna