Why are my imported pictures fuzzy or blurry?

Are the pictures taken with a digital camera - or with a smart phone or tablet camera?

When I get jpegs from the relatives I immediately open them in Photoshop and save them to PSD files - then I resized down to snapshot using 600 pixels to the inch as that is what I like working in if I will enhance the picture.

Have noticed that sometimes the phone pictures sometimes come in a bit off when looked at actual pixels even before I reduce the size so wondering if its the phone or tablet software causing the problem.

Saving pictures at 600 DPI is kinda ridiculuous.

There are no home or semi pro, large format inkjet printers OR professional printing equipment that prints or needs this high a resolution for any final printed image.

Home/consumer and semi-pro or large format inkjet printers are only capable of printing at a resolutions between 150-225 DPI max.

Plus, saving an image at such a high DPI only balloons the file size and offers no extra benefit in visual/optical resolution by doing so. None.

For professional printing of dIgital artwork or printing of high resolution scans of real artwork (scanned artwork at between 600-1200 DPI then reduced down), the highest DPI pro printers we have here in western, MA is 350 DPI ( the normal print standard is 300 DPI).

A "print on demand" project I am currently working on I am saving files as high resolution jpegs images that will be output to a high end Xerox color copier that reproduces color images at near pro printing quality at 250 DPI output.

The digital artwork files are Photoshop files with sizes of between 750 to 900 MBs or so in size. (12" x 19" paper format).

By flattening and saving these files using the highest "best" quality jpeg setting in PS, the file sizes get reduced to around 100-175 MBs in size.

The Xerox outputted Images are indistinguishable from my home printed images outputted on my large format (13" x 19") inkjet printer.

High DPI images above 400 DPI doesn't equate with superior resolution, only waste of extraneous data that is not needed.

As I was scanning in old photographs and repairing them by getting rid of scratches, fingerprints, dust, etc - chose the 600dpi and keep photo to size as it gave me the most detail to clean when showing actual pixels. Also came in handy for finding edges for layers for colorization.

I chose Cannon line of printers with multiple ink cartridges in order to avoid running out and both printers had no problem with the format.

On scanning - I scanned all pictures through Photoshop so I could immediately save them as PSD -- after initial try at cleaning up a picture in JPG default lost the sharpness after a couple of saves.

Have received photos from people with smart phones where they have lost the original picture when reducing size for their phone - and its no I can't fix it because it is now too small and only looks good as an icon.

notcloudy wrote:

On scanning - I scanned all pictures through Photoshop so I could immediately save them as PSD -- after initial try at cleaning up a picture in JPG default lost the sharpness after a couple of saves.

Have received photos from people with smart phones where they have lost the original picture when reducing size for their phone - and its no I can't fix it because it is now too small and only looks good as an icon.

Some smartphones do not have very high megapixels and can result in images that do do have enough pixel data initially and it is made worse by users who do not know how to properly edit those camera photos and end up stripping out even more of the pixel data to the point they are completely un-useable.

notcloudy wrote:

As I was scanning in old photographs and repairing them by getting rid of scratches, fingerprints, dust, etc - chose the 600dpi and keep photo to size as it gave me the most detail to clean when showing actual pixels. Also came in handy for finding edges for layers for colorization.

I chose Cannon line of printers with multiple ink cartridges in order to avoid running out and both printers had no problem with the format.

You can scan images at higher resolution so you can capture as much data and as much fine detail as possible in the scan, but after the initial scan, it is prudent to reduce the DPI back down to either 300-350 DPi. At that stage you won't lose detail and will be as sharp as the image will ever be.

This will tax Photoshop less and keep from having GB file sizes while editing in PS.

You are working with a large DPI file for no reason and making it harder for PS to process image editing and printing of such overly large PS files.

It is not necessary to be doing this.

FYI, PS actually creates 3 separate files when you open and start editing an image. (it saves the original image, keeps the current edited image and keeps a scratch disk version of the image in PS cache.

This is why when you open a 10 MB image in PS, the PS file increases to 30-35 GBs in size.

Reducing the scanned image in DPI after the scan will make it easier, also, for your print software and printer hardware to more easily and more quickly print out a final image.

It is important to remember that the final print out (either home or pro printing company or even a quick print business) will print out no higher than 350 DPI or less and the extra data will be, essentially, thrown away.