print quality vs sceen quality

[averof]

hey, i'm completely new to this program..and photo editing in general.. i just downloaded it the other day to help me print off multiple images on the same page that i saved from a website.

now my problem is that the print quality is lacking.. the printer i'm using is a huge hp color laserjet 4500 printer that i have seen print excellent quality photos before... so i don't think it's a printer issue..

the image looks clear on the screen, but the printout is somewhat fuzzy..just generally low res.. and around the little bit of text on the images, i get this blurry distortion.
i've searched the web and tried various things to improve the print quality.. i've followed this sizing guideline link i found on this site....gone into the size settings and changed the resolution to 300 while keeping the size to 2.5x3.5 inches and saved it as a tiff, which boosted the file size from a 60kb jpeg to 2megs.. and the print out of that was the same quality as the default 72 res that the pictures were apparently at to begin with.. i just noticed some really minor differences, but not improvements

so i don't get it... why can't i print at the same quality i see on my screen..at the print size on the screen, it looks perfect..or are the pictures actually bad quality and my screen just makes em look better? to anyone who knows about this, please shed some light on my situation

thank you

[Wendy]

Hi ..

... and welcome to the forum :)

Sadly the resolution needed for viewing onscreen is a lot less than you need for printing and if the original is only 60kb then that really is very small .. its just not enough for a print.

When you made the image larger all that happened was that Elements "invented" pixels to add into the image, it may have given you a larger image but resampling in this way isn't going to help with this one.

There really isn't much that you can do with it :(

Wendy

[averof]

ah well...if theres nothing i can do, i can settle with it.... just didn't want to find out later that i could have done something..

thanks a lot for yer help

[Wendy]

Hi ...

Just sorry that I couldn't give you better news ...

Wendy

[NickLewis]

I'm not disagreeing with Wendy at all, but you could try resizing the image in small steps, instead of going straight to your target size. PSE still has to invent pixels, but the overall result is sometimes more appealing visually if you limit the size increase to about 10% each time.

This works quite well with modest changes, but the trouble is, you're looking to make a huge change with this image. If you have a 2.5"x3.5" image at 72 ppi, this is equivalent to a 5"x7" at 36 ppi. You need at least 200ppi for photographic quality. So you would have to resize the image 16 times at 10% a time to get from 36 to 200 ppi in a standard enprint. So I doubt that you'll have a decent result.

But you could try. It'll only take a few minutes of your time, and a sheet of paper.

Nick