Preparing files for printing and their resolution

When you upload a file, Textilfy should in principle correctly recognise the actual size of the image and also its resolution. This, obviously, does not always happen because there are many image editing programs, with multiple versions of each of them, and it is difficult that even having a standard file extension and resolution the recognition of all the data in the file works automatically correctly 100% of the time.

This is why it is so important that, before loading the final print file, you check thoroughly what values Textilfy is giving you (what values it is measuring automatically) and if they correspond to what you want to obtain in fabric.

We are going to make an example here by uploading an image with the Textilfy logo. You can download it from here in case you want to test it.

After selecting the type of fabric and quantity we need, we upload it directly and the following information appears:

Textilfy is telling us that it has correctly recognised the image, it indicates firstly the name of the file and secondly its weight. Then the size in pixels and finally its dimension in centimetres at a specific resolution.

This size in centimetres and this resolution are the dimensions to be respected when preparing the file for typing.

If we look at the preview that Textilfy also makes automatically:

We can count that in the 145cm width of the fabric there are 11 repetitions of the logo and a little more of nº 12. If you divide 145cm by those 11 units you get a little more than 13 centimetres, which is what Textilfy is telling you (in text) that your file is wide.

IMPORTANT. The preview that Textilfy makes is just that, a PREVIEW. It is normally loaded at a very low resolution to make it as fast as possible and not to saturate the server because several clients are loading designs simultaneously. Therefore, if you notice a low quality in the file or a marked pixelation, you should not panic as long as you have made sure that your file is of sufficient quality. That is to say, there are times when even with sufficient quality the file may look a little blurry or pixelated in the preview.

Let's now open this same file in Photoshop and check its dimensions from the menu Image > Image Size....

What information can we read here? That indeed the width x height pixels coincide exactly with the automatic reading returned by Textilfy. But if we continue a little further down, in Document size, we see differences. Here we see a resolution of 300 dpi and dimensions of 6.16 x 6.16 cm. We can see that this is just half of what Textilfy indicated because the image has just double the resolution.

Actually the image is exactly the same, i.e. the file as such contains exactly the same information. The difference is that Photoshop is displaying it at 300dpi instead of 150dpi. If we do the exercise of modifying the resolution down to 150dpi and (VERY IMPORTANT) without checking the Resample image option, we get the following:

In this case it is measuring the same size as Textilfy although there is a slight difference.

If you are not sure that the resolution/quality/size of your file is correct, please check the "File Review" option that we have included in our shopping cart.