Trouble with Christmas card quality

[Jean2]

I was putting my order in for my Christmas cards with Winkflash...under my order it says Low Quality warning. So I went to Walmart and printed one and it is blurry. So I remade my card, resizing the photo to a 3 by 5 to go on my 5 by 7 document.(I thought maybe my photo was too large when I put it on my 5 by 7 document) Now Winkflash still says my card has low quality...I am printing them as 5 by 7's.
Can anyone help me figure this out? I would hate to order 50 blurry cards.

Christmas card 1 - Digital Scrapbooking Ideas - DesignerDigitals

[Cassie Jones (1gr8muggle)]

It sounds like you might have the resolution set too low. I would create a card at 300 dpi for printing. In your software, type Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+I to bring up the Image Size dialog box and see what the resolution is.

[katie pertiet]

and if you did happen to make the resolution too low, it's best to start fresh at 300dpi instead of resizing from low resolution in order to have the best possible quality

[kcar08]

Are you printing the original size image or the one you resized for the gallery here?

Check the image size and resolution (in Photoshop, Image > Image Size). 150 pixels/inch resolution should be enough for a 5x7 print. 300 pixels per inch (also called DPI) is the standard for printing (especially for 12 x 12 prints) but I think 150 gives pretty good results for smaller prints.

My guess is that when you cropped it or saved it (maybe to reduce the size?), somehow the pixels/inch got changed, and the resolution isn't high enough. If you used the crop tool to crop your photo or layout, make sure the "resolution" field is blank so that it doesn't change it to a lower resolution.

Basically when you get those warnings, they are checking to make sure there are enough pixels in the photo to print at the size desired. So, for example, 5 x 7 at 150 DPI would be 1050 pixels by 750 pixels.

Hope this helps....

[kcar08]

Sorry, I was replying while the others were. If you are recreating the card then you should definitely use 300 dpi (which is what the papers and digital items here are created at). Your original photo file is almost certainly 300 or more DPI as well.

[Jean2]

Thank you so much for your help. I finally got around to redo my cards. My problem was that I didn't start with a 300 dpi document. Your tips really helped me!