How do we find good artwork for printing, especially for large format type printing? The short answer is you are going to either try and find “Vector” files, or images with a high “dpi” (dots per inch)
Looking for Vector files - Look in these file extensions:
- .EPS (Best chance, may not be visible to you without graphics software, but we can see them)
- .SVG
Vector files are scalable, meaning they are made of lines (like fonts on your computer), they can scale to any size without getting fuzzy, making them the ideal art for all printing. Vector files are generally in files with the .EPS extension and can also be in .PDF and .SVG files. Vector files cannot be in .JPG, .PNG, .PSD, .BMP files.
While these are the best file formats to find vector art, they can also just have a .JPG in them, but it is the best bet to find good vector art, so it is worth a try.
No Vector art? Next best file is high resolution .jpg or other “dot based” images. These will have extensions such as:
- .JPG (best chance for good resolution files)
- .PNG
- .BMP
- .GIF (these are usually for low res website usage and rarely work for printing)
Dot based images are made up of dots like a photo, these dots are finite in the image and are spread out as it enlarges, so the more dots we have in the image the larger we can enlarge it.
A quick way to find the highest resolution .JPG look for the size of the file in ”Details” on your folder of images. It should show you “Size” as a column when turned on. The bigger the number in size the better chance it will be good artwork. Anything over 75k has a chance of being good but grab the largest one you can find. We can never have too many dots in an image.