Solve : Dell Printer is Printing Images in Very Poor Quality?

1.	Solve : Dell Printer is Printing Images in Very Poor Quality?
Answer» So I have been reading online for some weeks that I should increase the dpi of my images to get better quality upon printing. Trying this multiple times, the quality of the image is still very poor and is just getting worse. I have a Dell 3115cn printer at work and we print a lot of information sheets on our company and products. I`m finding that the printer is printing these weird pixels that are not visible on screen. So I went into Photoshop and re-did the image from scratch at 300 dpi. The colours of this one particular image I`m currently working on is red and white. FFFFFF is being used to get the purest white possible. The printer prints these dark, huge and nasty looking pixels in those white areas. It prints BEST out of photoshop, ok but getting pixels in Power Point but just the worst quality possible in PDF. I read that having the image in png instead of jpg was an issue. Making it jpg didn`t help whatsoever. My ink levels are at 80% on all 4 cartridges. Telling the program to tell the printer to print "high quality" didn`t help. Having the dpi at 300 isn`t helping. I have some old prints form the printer made last year by the previous employee in my position and there is no pixelation whatsoever and I am using all the same programs as they did to create these brochures (creating images, then putting it together in Power Point then converting to PDF and printing from there). Why is this happening and what will solve it? I have changed the many settings in both Power Point and Adobe Acrobat various websites during my search say for me to change but nothing still is making these images retain their quality.Whoever the prior used did before worked. He did not have to do what you are trying ton do. Leave it alone. The default settings are then best for most applications. Every time a picture has to be adjusted into another format, quality is lost. The exceptions is to use then recommended methods used for common pictures in several programs. This often means the pictures are stored in just one place in the high-quality format and other programs have to link the pictures rather than embed them. The picture is temporary sized to fit the display, and sized again from then original to fit the printer. The original is never altered. The resolution on your screen is much lower than the printer. If the picture is from a link, the print thing will scale the picture correctly to the printer. But if the picture has been forced to be a raster, it will look ugly on the printer. Hope you understand that. Perhaps this might explain it better. http://www.labnol.org/software/insert-images-in-word-documents/8144/Thanks for sharing the link. What do you mean by "raster"? Whoever the prior used did before worked. He did not have to do what you are trying ton do. Leave it alone. The default settings are then best for most applications. How do I reset the defaults in PowerPoint? I can`t seem to find that function and I think I just may be not looking in the right place. I read over the link and tried out the method mentioned. It has helped but still isn`t quite there. So then my understanding is that regardless of what I do, quality in the image, particularly ones that have white on them since that`s where the extra mess is appearing, is lost, especially during the conversion to PDF despite efforts to convert it because this is how the programs are handling the conversion between the formats. If that is the case, since Photoshop is giving me the best results for this brochure, should I just re-create all of our brochures to that format and THEN convert to PDF? I made a quick test and am seeing better results but I would like to test further before making any official statements. I hesitate though doing it this way because I`m one of the few employees here that can work with Photoshop and Photoshop doesn`t seem to scale things as cleanly as what PowerPoint does (or at LEAST one this first test it hasn`t, I`ll make a full test before saying anything officially about that, too) and Photoshop also seems to make editing the files more difficult than Power Point. (For the record, I am a total Photoshop lover, I use it for all of my personal projects. But when it comes to printing I always hire a professional printer company to print for me. So this issue is kind of new to me.) PowerPoint seems to have nearly all the pluses (for the business anyway, I wouldn`t use it for my own persona projects) for modifying these brochure files (it easily changes paragraphs to make it conform to the edges of the canvas whereas Photoshop will let it run off the canvas sides, it has text effects we like to use on our brochures that Photoshop doesn`t have, it has clip art that Photoshop doesn`t have). Is it possible to use PowerPoint to make those text effects and clip art images and just "copy and paste" into Photoshop? (It may be the long way of doing it but as an artist and for the need of presenting my company as professional when our sales people hand out these brochures in meetings, I want quality when these prints are done and if this is the way it has to be done when other methods have been exhausted, so be it). It looks great on screen (even in the past before I started making posts asking for help) but printing (even from PowerPoint instead of PDF since PDF is just chopping it to bits) still seems to have issues. At least with the method in the link you shared has made progress for printing from PowerPoint. There is a noticeable difference between how it prints from PowerPoint now than before with that "Insert and Link" method. But what do you think? Should I just re-create everything in Photoshop? I`ll post again after I have made a full test that I mentioned earlier and report the results. Should be in no more than an hour.Ok, I re-created (quickly) one of the pages of our brochure in Photoshop and directly converted into PDF then printed. I don`t have any of those nasty pixels showing up. I will need to make adjustments to make the design fit the original exactly (like changing font sizes) but it would appear that using Photoshop to create these pages and then directly convert to PDF seems to be the magic combo of getting the images to print out properly WITHOUT all that mess. I still worry if this is the best way to go, mainly because if anyone else needs to edit these brochures when I`m not around/too busy/no longer employed at this company.Here is an item of interest. http://thedailyreviewer.com/windowsapps/view/print-to-pdf-horrible-image-quality-10175742 Quote It looks great on screen That is what I mean by 'raster', the physical display you see, which is always less detail than the original artwork done for a brochure or paper presentation. Many programs will adjust the a temporary copy of the original to fit the current raster size. This is done when the raster is to be the final destination. So you must specify in your program that as he final target is a paper presentation, which can have about four times as much detail for high-quality printing. JPEG image format is often used because it gives good color depth with moderate size on the hard drive. But it can ruin graphical art work. The GIF is great for artwork, if it is larger enough. For great qualify, the original GIF needs to by a pixel size about 3200 by 2400 and using and advanced color format. The GIF89a standard, will produce an 24-bit RGB true color image.in 256 color. A better choice is to use PNG as the common format for all programs. It can easily be adjusted for quality and disk size, but does not give compression as good as JPEG. If disk space is not an issue, use PNG with a very large pixel size. This is my personal choice. The PSD format is preferred with Photo Shop, but it is hard to get all programs to use it. I once knew how to do that, my I lost that feature on my machine. If it is any help, you may want to read up on image formats on Wikipedia. The trick is to get your programs to use the original image for preparing the virtual image that goes to the printer. Otherwise, the program tries to enlarge the embedded image that was prepared for the display raster that was used previously. The program must prepare a new virtual image in memory based of the original image stored on disk in the large pixel, deep color format. That is why I suggested using a link to the image. There are a number of programs suitable for doing presentations both non the screen and on paper. Sorry, I don't have enough recent experience to direct you to the best solution. I am just giving some notes about the image quality issue. Have you considered using a program from Adobe that integrates Photo editing, graphical design and PDF output in one program? In general, I use MS Word to prepare a brochure and print it on paper. But the images are linked, not embedded. I believe that helps the quality of the paper presentation. If I use JPG, I make sure is s very large and low compression. MS Word can also do PNG, which is a better choice if hard drive space is not an issue. My grimmer and vocabulary are not always as good as it should be. But If I spend a lot of time doing a re write, it would take longer to respond. Hope this is of some help. Interesting. Because when I tried PNGs at 300 dpi, I was getting noticeably worse results than jpg at 100 dpi. I, too, am a believer of PNGs for good image quality (I used to use BMPs, then GIFs, then I converted to JPG-ism now I`m a PNG-ist) so I was surprised as how terrible it was being handled (especially by Adobe, the lord of graphics). By the suggestion of a co-worker, I tried using BMP in PowerPoint and ocnverted to PDF and the results are better than any of the PNG and JPGs! Go FIGURE. I guess BMP still has some uses, lol. It`s not perfect though but it has gotten us closer to what we`re GOING for. However, Photoshop converted straight to PDF has given us the 5-star quality that we`re looking for. But like I said, some things in creating the brochure pages in Photoshop (as previously discussed) is what`s making me want to continue looking for a sure fire solution. Maybe we can use the BMPs in PowerPoint and re-create pages in Photoshop for now until that golden solution comes around. If anything, at least there`s a couple options of a work around in the meantime. At least the quality is excellent (or at least close to it) and that is what I was looking for. Thanks for taking the time to try to help me out with this, sticking with me and showing me those links. Much appreciated! If any new development comes from this situation, I`ll try to remember to come back to this thread and update it in case there`s anyone who stumbles upon this in the future.Glad to see you are making progress. Keep at it and you will find a solution. Here are two pictures of my front porch. Wide view. http://geek9pm.com/porch/details0001.jpg Close up. http://geek9pm.com/porch/details0002.jpg Let me explain. It was NOT done with a close-up lens. Instead, only the Photo Editor I have made the difference. The first photo is the picture scaled down 5 times to be viewable on the raster of your display device. Otherwise it would be too large. The second photo is a copy or the original cropped to be viewable on the display. Notice there still is a lot of detail, even tho it is a JPG. My camera does only JPG, but it allows me to use low compression to preserve detail. Anyway, this is to illustrate what happens when you try to fit an image to the display. Either you loose detail, or you have to crop the image. Image #1 now has been permanent altered so the detail is lost. Only image two has the detaiols nof the flower pot. But it is only a part of originality. If I want the picture will all of its features, I would have to download it again from the camera. And perhaps store the original copy some place where it will not be altered. This is a simple show of what happens when you degenerate pixel size in an image. Make sure you keep a backup of the original.

Answer»

So I have been reading online for some weeks that I should increase the dpi of my images to get better quality upon printing. Trying this multiple times, the quality of the image is still very poor and is just getting worse.

I have a Dell 3115cn printer at work and we print a lot of information sheets on our company and products. I`m finding that the printer is printing these weird pixels that are not visible on screen. So I went into Photoshop and re-did the image from scratch at 300 dpi. The colours of this one particular image I`m currently working on is red and white. FFFFFF is being used to get the purest white possible. The printer prints these dark, huge and nasty looking pixels in those white areas. It prints BEST out of photoshop, ok but getting pixels in Power Point but just the worst quality possible in PDF.

I read that having the image in png instead of jpg was an issue. Making it jpg didn`t help whatsoever. My ink levels are at 80% on all 4 cartridges. Telling the program to tell the printer to print "high quality" didn`t help. Having the dpi at 300 isn`t helping.

I have some old prints form the printer made last year by the previous employee in my position and there is no pixelation whatsoever and I am using all the same programs as they did to create these brochures (creating images, then putting it together in Power Point then converting to PDF and printing from there).

Why is this happening and what will solve it? I have changed the many settings in both Power Point and Adobe Acrobat various websites during my search say for me to change but nothing still is making these images retain their quality.Whoever the prior used did before worked. He did not have to do what you are trying ton do. Leave it alone. The default settings are then best for most applications.

Every time a picture has to be adjusted into another format, quality is lost. The exceptions is to use then recommended methods used for common pictures in several programs. This often means the pictures are stored in just one place in the high-quality format and other programs have to link the pictures rather than embed them. The picture is temporary sized to fit the display, and sized again from then original to fit the printer. The original is never altered.

The resolution on your screen is much lower than the printer. If the picture is from a link, the print thing will scale the picture correctly to the printer. But if the picture has been forced to be a raster, it will look ugly on the printer.

Hope you understand that.
Perhaps this might explain it better.
http://www.labnol.org/software/insert-images-in-word-documents/8144/Thanks for sharing the link. What do you mean by "raster"?

Whoever the prior used did before worked. He did not have to do what you are trying ton do. Leave it alone. The default settings are then best for most applications.
How do I reset the defaults in PowerPoint? I can`t seem to find that function and I think I just may be not looking in the right place.

I read over the link and tried out the method mentioned. It has helped but still isn`t quite there. So then my understanding is that regardless of what I do, quality in the image, particularly ones that have white on them since that`s where the extra mess is appearing, is lost, especially during the conversion to PDF despite efforts to convert it because this is how the programs are handling the conversion between the formats.

If that is the case, since Photoshop is giving me the best results for this brochure, should I just re-create all of our brochures to that format and THEN convert to PDF? I made a quick test and am seeing better results but I would like to test further before making any official statements. I hesitate though doing it this way because I`m one of the few employees here that can work with Photoshop and Photoshop doesn`t seem to scale things as cleanly as what PowerPoint does (or at LEAST one this first test it hasn`t, I`ll make a full test before saying anything officially about that, too) and Photoshop also seems to make editing the files more difficult than Power Point. (For the record, I am a total Photoshop lover, I use it for all of my personal projects. But when it comes to printing I always hire a professional printer company to print for me. So this issue is kind of new to me.)

PowerPoint seems to have nearly all the pluses (for the business anyway, I wouldn`t use it for my own persona projects) for modifying these brochure files (it easily changes paragraphs to make it conform to the edges of the canvas whereas Photoshop will let it run off the canvas sides, it has text effects we like to use on our brochures that Photoshop doesn`t have, it has clip art that Photoshop doesn`t have). Is it possible to use PowerPoint to make those text effects and clip art images and just "copy and paste" into Photoshop? (It may be the long way of doing it but as an artist and for the need of presenting my company as professional when our sales people hand out these brochures in meetings, I want quality when these prints are done and if this is the way it has to be done when other methods have been exhausted, so be it). It looks great on screen (even in the past before I started making posts asking for help) but printing (even from PowerPoint instead of PDF since PDF is just chopping it to bits) still seems to have issues.

At least with the method in the link you shared has made progress for printing from PowerPoint. There is a noticeable difference between how it prints from PowerPoint now than before with that "Insert and Link" method. But what do you think? Should I just re-create everything in Photoshop?

I`ll post again after I have made a full test that I mentioned earlier and report the results. Should be in no more than an hour.Ok, I re-created (quickly) one of the pages of our brochure in Photoshop and directly converted into PDF then printed. I don`t have any of those nasty pixels showing up. I will need to make adjustments to make the design fit the original exactly (like changing font sizes) but it would appear that using Photoshop to create these pages and then directly convert to PDF seems to be the magic combo of getting the images to print out properly WITHOUT all that mess.

I still worry if this is the best way to go, mainly because if anyone else needs to edit these brochures when I`m not around/too busy/no longer employed at this company.Here is an item of interest.
http://thedailyreviewer.com/windowsapps/view/print-to-pdf-horrible-image-quality-10175742

Quote

It looks great on screen

That is what I mean by 'raster', the physical display you see, which is always less detail than the original artwork done for a brochure or paper presentation. Many programs will adjust the a temporary copy of the original to fit the current raster size. This is done when the raster is to be the final destination. So you must specify in your program that as he final target is a paper presentation, which can have about four times as much detail for high-quality printing.

JPEG image format is often used because it gives good color depth with moderate size on the hard drive. But it can ruin graphical art work. The GIF is great for artwork, if it is larger enough. For great qualify, the original GIF needs to by a pixel size about 3200 by 2400 and using and advanced color format. The GIF89a standard, will produce an 24-bit RGB true color image.in 256 color. A better choice is to use PNG as the common format for all programs. It can easily be adjusted for quality and disk size, but does not give compression as good as JPEG. If disk space is not an issue, use PNG with a very large pixel size. This is my personal choice.
The PSD format is preferred with Photo Shop, but it is hard to get all programs to use it. I once knew how to do that, my I lost that feature on my machine.

If it is any help, you may want to read up on image formats on Wikipedia. The trick is to get your programs to use the original image for preparing the virtual image that goes to the printer. Otherwise, the program tries to enlarge the embedded image that was prepared for the display raster that was used previously. The program must prepare a new virtual image in memory based of the original image stored on disk in the large pixel, deep color format. That is why I suggested using a link to the image.

There are a number of programs suitable for doing presentations both non the screen and on paper. Sorry, I don't have enough recent experience to direct you to the best solution. I am just giving some notes about the image quality issue.

Have you considered using a program from Adobe that integrates Photo editing, graphical design and PDF output in one program?

In general, I use MS Word to prepare a brochure and print it on paper. But the images are linked, not embedded. I believe that helps the quality of the paper presentation. If I use JPG, I make sure is s very large and low compression. MS Word can also do PNG, which is a better choice if hard drive space is not an issue.

My grimmer and vocabulary are not always as good as it should be. But If I spend a lot of time doing a re write, it would take longer to respond. Hope this is of some help.
Interesting. Because when I tried PNGs at 300 dpi, I was getting noticeably worse results than jpg at 100 dpi. I, too, am a believer of PNGs for good image quality (I used to use BMPs, then GIFs, then I converted to JPG-ism now I`m a PNG-ist) so I was surprised as how terrible it was being handled (especially by Adobe, the lord of graphics).

By the suggestion of a co-worker, I tried using BMP in PowerPoint and ocnverted to PDF and the results are better than any of the PNG and JPGs! Go FIGURE. I guess BMP still has some uses, lol. It`s not perfect though but it has gotten us closer to what we`re GOING for. However, Photoshop converted straight to PDF has given us the 5-star quality that we`re looking for. But like I said, some things in creating the brochure pages in Photoshop (as previously discussed) is what`s making me want to continue looking for a sure fire solution. Maybe we can use the BMPs in PowerPoint and re-create pages in Photoshop for now until that golden solution comes around. If anything, at least there`s a couple options of a work around in the meantime. At least the quality is excellent (or at least close to it) and that is what I was looking for.

Thanks for taking the time to try to help me out with this, sticking with me and showing me those links. Much appreciated! If any new development comes from this situation, I`ll try to remember to come back to this thread and update it in case there`s anyone who stumbles upon this in the future.Glad to see you are making progress. Keep at it and you will find a solution.

Here are two pictures of my front porch.
Wide view.
http://geek9pm.com/porch/details0001.jpg
Close up.
http://geek9pm.com/porch/details0002.jpg
Let me explain. It was NOT done with a close-up lens.
Instead, only the Photo Editor I have made the difference.
The first photo is the picture scaled down 5 times to be viewable on the raster of your display device. Otherwise it would be too large.
The second photo is a copy or the original cropped to be viewable on the display. Notice there still is a lot of detail, even tho it is a JPG. My camera does only JPG, but it allows me to use low compression to preserve detail.
Anyway, this is to illustrate what happens when you try to fit an image to the display. Either you loose detail, or you have to crop the image. Image #1 now has been permanent altered so the detail is lost. Only image two has the detaiols nof the flower pot. But it is only a part of originality.
If I want the picture will all of its features, I would have to download it again from the camera. And perhaps store the original copy some place where it will not be altered.
This is a simple show of what happens when you degenerate pixel size in an image. Make sure you keep a backup of the original.

Solve : Dell Printer is Printing Images in Very Poor Quality?

Discussion

No Comment Found

Related InterviewSolutions

Reply to Comment