Image Capture Best Practices
I'm using Image Capture to export musical examples for websites. One site has a limitation of "650px in width" for uploaded images.
The musical examples I will be creating are different widths in MS (i.e. assuming the same measure width, some are one measure wide, some three measures wide, etc.).
What are best practices for capturing images that will maintain their quality (crispness)? I've been exporting from MS at 2400 dpi but perhaps this is much too high? An explanation in layman's terms would be much appreciated!
Comments
P.S. The main website I'm exporting to recommends that "when saving the image (in the application you created it in) make sure in pixels the dimensions don't exceed 650px in width." So how do I do that in MS?
In reply to P.S. The main website I'm… by darkstream
Use a capable image-edit app, even a minimal one like MS Paint or Mac free Pixelmator, to scale captured images and set their resolution as you wish.
In reply to P.S. The main website I'm… by darkstream
The math is simple. DPI is literally dots per inch. If your musical example is, say, 6 inches wide, and you export it at 2400 DPI, that is 6 * 2400 = 14,400 dots wide. In other words, it is about 20 times wider than recommended by the website :-)
If you are trying to make a 6-inch-wide example take no more than 650 pixels, then 100 DPI gets you there nicely, comes in at 600 pixels. And this makes total sense. 100 DPI was for years the default resolution of most monitors, and even in this day of high resolution displays (eg, "Retina" displays and others with DPI values of 200-300), they usually do some magic scaling because much of the world still assumes a 650-pixel image is 6.5 inches wide.
2400dpi is insanely high. Most professional printers use a 300/600dpi value.
Hell, on a 4K screen, the equivalent of 1 inch on paper would take up half the screen!
In the early web days, a normal web dpi was 72. For most current screens, anywhere between 150 and 360 is quite enough, (mobile non-retina screens have about 244dpi on average). So if you choose 300dpi your "crispiness" is more than high enough.
This also means that (using 300 dpi) your captured image can little over 2 inches wide (5cm in normal units). For such a website limit I'd probably go with something in the 96-120dpi range.
For high quality, consider using SVG instead (but likely your websites won't allow that...)
In reply to 2400dpi is insanely high… by jeetee
I set DPI in "Preferences / Export" to 100. For whatever reason, this gives me a manageable image-size close to what I see in MuseScore when I paste into outgoing Email, which I do very frequently. 300 makes it 3 times that big. I have a Retina screen, but Safari and my email client probably contribute opinions that factor into that, too.