What DPI Do You Need to Print Art? 300 vs 240 vs 150

The print shop asks for “300 DPI”. Your Procreate file says 132 DPI, your scanner offers 1200, and a friend swears 150 is plenty. All of these can be right, because DPI on its own doesn’t describe a file. The short answer: for prints people hold or hang at arm’s length, aim for 300 pixels per inch at the final print size; 240 is fine for most wall prints; 150 is the floor for posters seen from across a room. The rest of this guide is why, and how to check your own files before you pay for a print run.

DPI, PPI and the only number that matters

Strictly speaking, PPI (pixels per inch) describes your image and DPI (dots per inch) describes a printer. An inkjet rated at 2880 or 5760 DPI is telling you how finely it places droplets of ink, which has nothing to do with your file. In practice labs, clients and software menus say DPI for both, so we will too.

What actually decides print quality is the pixel count. Divide pixels by inches and you get the resolution of the print:

• A 4800 × 6000 px file prints at 16 × 20 in at 300 DPI,
• at 20 × 25 in at 240 DPI,
• and at 32 × 40 in at 150 DPI.

Same file, same pixels. The DPI number stored in the file’s metadata is just a label that tells software which of those sizes to suggest by default. Changing it doesn’t add or remove a single pixel, which is why “Can you send it at 300 DPI?” really means “Does your file have enough pixels for this size?”

Why 300, and when less is enough

Normal 20/20 vision separates details about one arcminute apart — a sixtieth of a degree. Turn that into pixels per inch and you get a handy formula: the finest resolution the eye can use is about 3438 ÷ viewing distance in inches. At 12 in, a print in your hands, that’s 286 PPI. Round up and you have the industry’s 300.

People don’t view every print from 12 inches, though. A common rule of thumb is that viewers stand back about one and a half times the print’s diagonal to take it in. Put the two together:

That’s why a 24 × 36 poster at 150 DPI looks crisp on the wall: from five feet away, your eye can’t use more than about 53 PPI.

Art is different from posters in one way: people lean in. Collectors step up to look at brushwork, and buyers handle prints before framing them. So treat the table as a floor, not a target. Our working rule is 300 PPI for anything up to 11 × 14 and for anything with fine linework or small lettering; 240 for larger giclée and photo-paper prints; 150 as the lowest acceptable number for big posters. And don’t lose sleep over 280 versus 300 — nobody can see that difference in a print.

How big can your file print?

Here is what common sources give you at full size, without cropping. Pixels are width × height as the file comes out of the device; print sizes are in inches. The iPad row is Procreate’s “Screen Size” canvas on a 12.9-inch iPad Pro, and the 48 MP phone row assumes the camera’s full-resolution mode.

Two rows surprise people. A phone photo of a flat, evenly lit painting has enough pixels for an 8 × 10 print at 300 DPI with room to spare. A painting made on a screen-sized iPad canvas does not have enough for an 11 × 14: stretched to that size it drops to about 186 PPI. If you paint digitally with prints in mind, set the canvas up for the largest print you might sell before the first stroke — the Digital Canvas Size for Print tool gives the pixel size, with bleed, for each app.

And the Instagram export you saved “just in case” is a 4 × 5 in print at best. Keep the master file.

Cropping changes the answer

The table assumes you print the whole image. Most cameras shoot 3:2 and most phones 4:3, while the classic print sizes are other shapes: 8 × 10 and 16 × 20 are 4:5, 11 × 14 is a touch longer than 4:5, and 18 × 24 is 3:4. Every crop throws pixels away, and the DPI is calculated on what’s left.

• A 24 MP camera file held upright (4000 × 6000) cropped to 4:5 becomes 4000 × 5000 — a sixth of the picture gone. It still prints 16 × 20 at 250 DPI, but 24 × 30 only at 167.
• A 12 MP phone photo upright (3024 × 4032) cropped to 4:5 loses just 6.25%, keeping 3024 × 3780. That’s 378 DPI at 8 × 10 and 189 at 16 × 20.

The Aspect Ratio Calculator shows the exact crop for any pair of sizes. If you sell prints at the size of the original, convert the canvas first: a 40 × 50 cm canvas is 15.7 × 19.7 in, which isn’t quite 16 × 20, and the Canvas Size Calculator will show you the nearest standard size before you order mats or frames.

Scanning artwork: the settings that matter

A flatbed scanner is the best reproduction tool most artists own, as long as the settings are right.

Resolution. Scan at the print resolution multiplied by how much you plan to enlarge. Printing at the original size: 300 DPI for paintings and colored drawings, 600 for ink line art. Printing bigger: a 5 × 7 drawing headed for a 10 × 14 print at 300 needs a 600 DPI scan; a 4 × 6 sketch headed for 12 × 18 needs 900. Use the scanner’s optical resolution from its spec sheet; settings above it are interpolated and add no real detail.

Color mode and bit depth. Scan color work in 24-bit color (8 bits per channel). Choose 48-bit if you expect to do heavy color correction, then convert down when you’re done. Pure ink drawings can be scanned in grayscale and cleaned up with a threshold later.

Plan for file size. Uncompressed scans get big fast:

Switch off the helpers. Auto-sharpen, auto-exposure and auto color all guess, and you can’t undo a guess baked into the scan. Descreen is only for scanning printed material such as magazine pages, where it suppresses moiré; on original art it just blurs.

Save a lossless master. Keep the scan as TIFF or PNG and export JPEGs from it for the lab or the web. Work larger than the scanner glass can be scanned in overlapping sections and merged, and heavily textured paintings often reproduce better photographed under two lights at 45° than scanned, because a scanner’s single light source throws hard little shadows from impasto.

Upscaling: when it helps and when it lies

Sometimes the pixels just aren’t there. Classic interpolation, such as bicubic resampling, invents in-between pixels by averaging their neighbors. The result is softer but honest: it never adds a feature that wasn’t in the original. For a soft painting viewed at normal distance, a modest upscale often prints acceptably.

AI upscalers go further. Photoshop’s Super Resolution, for example, doubles width and height — four times the pixels — and fills them with plausible detail. Plausible isn’t the same as yours. These tools can turn paper grain into a repeating pattern, rework fine hatching, and garble small lettering or a signature. If you use one, inspect the result at 100% zoom, compare it side by side with the original, and order a small test print of the busiest section before committing to a full run. For line art and lettering, redrawing or rescanning at a higher resolution beats any upscaler.

A quick pre-flight before you send files

1. Read the pixel dimensions, not the DPI field.
2. Divide by the print size in inches. 300 or more is excellent, 240 is fine for wall prints, 150 is the floor for posters. The DPI & Print Size Calculator does this division for every common size at once.
3. Check the crop: is the signature or a hand about to disappear?
4. Add bleed if the printer asks for it — usually 0.125 in per side in the US, 3 mm in the UK and Europe.
5. Flatten, export in sRGB unless the lab asks for something else, and save at maximum JPEG quality or as TIFF.