Print · 5 min read · April 2026
Why your photos look fine on screen and bad in print
A phone screen is small, backlit and forgiving. Paper is none of those things. The same photograph that looks sharp in your gallery can arrive from the press soft, muddy or visibly pixelated — and it is nearly always one of three causes.
This is worth understanding before you send photographs to a designer, because a file that cannot print well cannot be rescued afterwards. No amount of editing puts back detail that was never captured or was thrown away in a WhatsApp forward.
Cause one: not enough pixels
Screens show around 72 to 150 pixels per inch. Print needs about 300. A photo that fills your laptop screen may only print well at postcard size, and the maths is simple enough to do yourself.
Divide the pixel width by 300 to get the printable width in inches. A 3000-pixel-wide photo prints cleanly at 10 inches.
Cause two: the file has been re-compressed
This one catches almost everybody. A photograph sent over WhatsApp is compressed and resized on the way through — often to well under a quarter of its original size. Save that image and forward it again and it degrades further. By the third pass there is visible blockiness around edges and text.
The photo on your phone and the photo your photographer took are frequently not the same file.
Send originals, from wherever they originated — the camera card, the photographer, your Drive folder. Google Drive, WeTransfer and email attachments all preserve the file; WhatsApp images and Instagram downloads do not. If you must use WhatsApp, send it as a document rather than a photo, which skips the compression.
Cause three: screen colour is not print colour
Your screen makes colour with light and can produce shades that ink physically cannot. Bright oranges, electric blues and deep saturated greens are the usual casualties — they arrive from the press duller than expected, and nothing was done wrong.
The other half of this is brightness. A photograph adjusted to look right on a screen at full brightness usually prints darker, because paper reflects light rather than emitting it. Shadow detail that reads clearly on your phone can close up into black on the page.
Part of a designer's job is converting and correcting for this before the file goes to press. If a colour genuinely cannot be reproduced, you should be told at proofing rather than discovering it in a delivered box of five hundred brochures.
A short checklist before sending photos
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Send originals, not forwards
Straight from the camera, the photographer or your Drive. Anything that has passed through WhatsApp or Instagram has already lost detail.
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Use Drive or WeTransfer
Both preserve the file exactly. If WhatsApp is unavoidable, attach the image as a document rather than as a photo.
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Check the pixel width
Divide by 300 for the printable width in inches. Under 1500 pixels wide, the photo can only be used small.
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Send more than you need
Extra angles and wider crops give the layout somewhere to breathe. Being able to choose the crop is worth a lot.
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Say which are non-negotiable
If a particular photo has to appear, tell me early — that changes how the page is built around it.
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Flag anything already printed
A photograph scanned from a previous brochure is a copy of a copy. It rarely survives a second print run.
Related reading
Not sure your photos are usable?
Send them over and I'll tell you before we start — including whether a reshoot would cost less than working around what you have.