300 dpi and beyond: image resolution for printed menus

The logo looks sharp on the phone and turns into a stamp on the carte. That is not a mystery of printing; it is arithmetic. A screen shows about 72 to 144 pixels in each inch. A press, and the eye at reading distance, wants closer to 300. Stretch a 72 dpi file to the size it occupies on an A5 and you are asking eight or nine screen pixels to stand in for each printed inch. They cannot. This article is the check you run before anyone spends money on paper, and the few cases where 300 is not the number that matters.

Dpi is not a quality slider

Dots per inch describe how many pixels land in a real-world inch at a given size. The same 600 × 600 pixel logo is 300 dpi at 2 inches and 72 dpi at 8.3 inches. Changing the dpi field in a dialog without changing pixel count does nothing to the file; it only changes the assumed size. What the press needs is enough pixels for the size you will actually print.

At 300 dpi, a logo 40 mm wide needs 472 pixels across. A full-bleed A5 face at 148 × 210 mm plus 3 mm bleed on each side is 154 × 216 mm, which is 1819 × 2551 pixels. A hero photograph that fills that face and arrives at 1200 pixels on the long side will look soft, then jagged on type-like edges (a plate rim, a knife). That is the failure guests notice first, because they hold the menu at 35 to 40 cm.

Line art and type should not be photographs at all. A logo drawn as vectors (PDF, AI, SVG exported cleanly) has no dpi. It scales. A logo that exists only as a PNG pulled from the website is a photograph of a logo, and it has a dpi the moment you place it.

The 72 dpi website file

Restaurant websites are built for screens. The mark in the header is often 200 to 400 pixels wide, saved at 72 dpi, sometimes with a white box around it, sometimes as a JPEG with compression halos. Placing that file at 35 mm on the menu cover is already a stretch. Placing it at 60 mm across the top of an A4 is a disaster. There is no upscaling filter that invents the edges a designer never drew.

Ask for the original. A proper mark is a vector, or a PNG at least 2000 pixels on the long side on a transparent ground, or a TIFF. If the only file in the drawer is the website header, commission a redraw or have the designer rebuild it from a scan of a large printed piece, not from the web JPEG. One evening of redrawing is cheaper than 60 soft logos on 350 g board.

Dish photographs have the same trap. A phone shot looks vivid on a phone and thin on paper: noise in the shadows, a colour profile meant for sRGB, and not enough pixels for a 90 mm square. If the photograph is the dish, shoot it for print: even light, a real camera or a phone at full resolution, export at the pixel count above, convert to CMYK with a proofing intent (Fogra39 / ISO Coated v2 is the European coated default) and look at it on paper, not only on a backlit screen.

When 300 is more than you need, and when it is less

Very small images can live at 250 dpi and no one will file a complaint; the eye is generous below 20 mm. Large flat tints and paper-coloured grounds have no dpi at all. A 600 dpi file of a photograph does not print sharper than 300 on a digital press whose engine already screens around 180 to 200 lpi; you are only making a heavier PDF. Sending a 120 MB menu file is not professionalism. It is a file that email rejects and rips slowly.

Hairline rules, small type reversed out of a photograph, and any mark with a thin serif need more care than a bowl of pasta. If type sits on top of an image, the image can be 250 dpi; the type must still be live type or a vector, not pixels. Flattening a whole menu to a single 300 dpi JPEG, a habit of some office tools, destroys every letter. The PDF must keep type as type.

• Logo: vector, or at least 472 pixels per 40 mm of printed width (300 dpi).
• Full A5 face with bleed: about 1800 × 2550 pixels if the face is a photograph.
• Website header JPEGs: do not place; redraw or replace.
• Final PDF: 300 dpi images, live type, CMYK or a defined output intent, not a flattened JPEG.

How to check a file in three minutes

In the layout, select each placed image and read the effective resolution, the dpi after scaling. Design tools show this in the links or properties panel. Anything below 200 dpi at the size on the page is a rewrite or a smaller picture. Between 200 and 300, judge on the subject: a soft landscape background may pass; a logo or a plate rim will not.

Open the PDF at 200 percent and look at edges. A sharp vector stays a line. A low-resolution bitmap becomes a staircase. Do this on the logo, on any icon, on the rim of a photographed plate, and on the QR code if you have one. A QR that is a screenshot will fail in the room even if it looks acceptable on screen.

Then look at colour. RGB photographs on a CMYK press lose saturation in the blues and the bright reds. Convert with a profile, or let a well-set RIP convert, but look at a proof. A tomato that was electric on the phone and brick on the carte is a resolution problem's cousin: the file was never prepared for ink on paper.

Bleed does not add pixels

A photograph that is exactly 148 × 210 mm cannot grow 3 mm of bleed on each side without stretching or revealing a white edge. Build images 6 mm larger in each direction from the start, or extend a quiet background, never scale a tight crop by 4 percent and hope the plate still sits in the right place. Crop marks sit outside the bleed; they are not part of the pixel count.

If you switch format from A4 to A5, every photograph that was sized for the larger sheet may drop below 300 dpi on the smaller one only if you keep the same crop and shrink the page; more often the opposite happens: you enlarge a detail to fill the smaller page and the dpi falls. Recheck effective resolution after every format change.

Let the export do the counting

The reason this keeps biting restaurant owners is that phones and websites never mention inches. A tool that is built for print will flag a low-resolution link, downsample a 600 dpi phone dump to a sensible 300, and refuse to flatten the type. That is ordinary prepress, not a luxury.

Menu Atelier exports the print PDF at 300 dpi with 3 mm bleed and crop marks on every face, and the on-screen 3D view is not a substitute for those pixels: it is a layout check. Place a real logo and real photographs at the start, not a screenshot from the booking site, and the 300 dpi file that leaves the studio is the file the press expects. If an image is too small, you will see it in the design, not on the delivery note.