DPI, Photoshop, making it simple for visual artists

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21494479

  •  05-10-2022
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Question

I have the following predicament:

a) I have a designer who designs in photoshop and always uses 72dpi b) I have developers who get his images and need them to be crisp and sharp for multiple android devices (larger/smaller in size, different dpis) c) I don't want to confuse the designer with points, dps, etc. I want him to continue using what he knows: 72dpi canvas, all sizes to be specified in pixels

I've read many,many,many threads and links and tutorials and am confused.

Here is what I plan to do: a) I plan to ask him to design screens using a 720px * 1280px screen. This is the resolution of a Samsung S3

b) I plan to ask him to specify all sizes of items inside reference screen, as well as their distance from phone boundaries in pixels too (I don't want to confuse him)

c) What the developers plan to then do, is take his assets and his reference screens, look at the sizes, and convert to dps in the android layout by basically adding applicable multipliers

d) What the designer also needs to do is resize images in his reference screen for ldpi, mdpi, xhdpi and xxhdpi, which my developers will move to the correct folders so they are picked up at runtime by Android depending on which devices they are testing on

e) NOTE: We plan to have the same layout for all sizes of phones - no different layouts, so assume that the design this person is creating will show well on all sizes

Questions: 1) The designer needs to know with this set up (72dpi PS screen,720x1280), when he is asked to resize images for different dpi buckets, what should he consider his reference screen as? MDPI or XHDPI as he will have to scale his images accordingly when generating them for the developer

2) I want to keep this simple for him. I don't want him to get confused on dpis. So I plan to tell him that forget about dpis when creating your photoshop reference screens -- just design for a 720x1280 screen @ the usual 72dpi. Our developers will convert all distances to dps on their side. Any issues with this?

3) I also need to tell my developers how to convert his pixel distances to dps, so I need to tell him what they should treat this 720x1280 72dpi screen as. Is it MDPI or XHDPI?

Thanks

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Solution 

Questions: 1)

Designer needs to design the artwork with XHDPI resolution i.e 720x1280 px and he need to down scale it with the ratio of

1 or 100% for XHDPI //baseline for designers

0.75 or 75% for HDPI 
0.50 or 50% for MDPI

Developer no need to care anything about the artwork sizes or re-sizing them.

Question 2)

You might be confused about what PPI (pixels per inch) to set your deliverables at. Just leave them at the standard 72 PPI, and scale the images accordingly.

// check this Link 

Question 3)

Ask your Developer to start design for MDPI first

1  for MDPI //baseline for developers
1.5 for HDPI 
2  for XHDPI

use this link for dp calculator

 1. Use wrap_content, fill_parent, or dp units when specifying
    dimensions in an XML layout file.
 2. Do not use hard coded pixel values in your application code
 3. Do not use AbsoluteLayout (it's deprecated) 
 4. Supply alternative bitmap drawables for different screen densities

Ref here:

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