Technical question

Umgowa

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In creating the cover for my book, my illustrator and I have gone back and forth together using our digital imaging software, the internet and many other tools, . . . . and finally I have a cover design that is perfect. The only problem is that it is in 72 PPI and my Cover designer (as opposed to my illustrator) requires an illustration that is in 300 PPI. My only digital imaging software is Pixelmator on my Mac and when I change the image to 300 PPI the size gets too small. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to achieve my 300 PPI goal? Right now the only thing I can think of is to print out the desired cover illustration, take it over to my nephew, who is a photographer and have him take a picture of it with his 300 PPI format camera. Does anyone have any other ideas?
 

Margrave86

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The fact that your image gets very small is normal--you've quadrupled the number of pixels per inch of screen space.

The only thing you can do is change the PPI to 300 and then scale it back up to the size you want. Unfortunately, it might look terrible. If Pixelmator (never heard of it) doesn't have an algorithm capable of scaling it well, I'd see about downloading GIMP, but even then there's not much you can do to fill in the fine details that weren't illustrated.

Honestly, I'm kind of surprised your cover artist didn't make the image in 300PPI to begin with.
 

kevinwaynewilliams

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Watch your dimensions and your dpi: if your image is 72dpi, but set to by 48"x72", that will make a very nice 6"x9" drawing at 300dpi. If it's 6"x9" at 72dpi, there's no way to get it to 6"x9" at 300dpi and look any good.