How should I print my renders?

Hi! I want to print some of my renders to a 6" x 4" photo paper. Can you please suggest me which paper would be good? Matte or Glossy and is there anything I have to change before sending them to print eg. the DPI. I have never printed any digital image. The renders are mostly of 960x540 size. I shall change the aspect ratio to fit the 6"x4" paper.

Print requires a certain minimum resolution. DPI isn’t some magic quality value, it’s just a conversion factor used to figure out how pixel dimensions translate to a physical piece of paper. 960x540 is a different aspect ratio from 6x4, for one. 6x4 is 1.5:1, which is sized for still camera frames. 960x450 is 1.77:1 aka 16:9, which is wider. So you’d need to either inset it and letterbox, or crop. I’ll assume you want to letterbox:

If we letterbox, we’ll fit based on the larger end. It’s 960 pixels digitally, and needs to be 6 inches physically. Thus, it becomes 960/6=160dpi. 160dpi is not all that high. It’s high enough that it will probably look ok, since renders are crisp to individual pixels whereas photographs generally aren’t. But it’s not perfect, if you used 6"x300dpi (aka, 1800 pixels wide) it should look crisper. Re-render if you can.

Second of all, you probably shouldn’t bother printing it yourself. Especially for 4x6, you can probably just take the file to any place that does digital photo prints and have them do it. An image file is an image file. (you may need to copy the file to an SD card or thumb drive so it can be fed to their machine).


I want to print something like this. Should I render an 1800px x 1200px image and then send it to print? And what type of paper should I use? Actually I’ll send those images to a local photo booth for printing.

If your image was originally 16:9, you can just render at 1800x1013 and pad it to 1800x1200 in GIMP or Photoshop or something. But otherwise, yeah, that’s the idea. Personally, I’d go with glossy, usually. Photographs and photographic-like-things tend to look dull on matte paper, but that’s a generalization. It really depends on your image and what you are printing it for. If you google “matte vs glossy paper” you can find countless articles on the pros and cons.

Thanks a lot :slight_smile: