I have oodles of pictures I took whilst on holiday but i took them using the email setting on my digital camera so when I emailed them they wouldn’t be a monstrous size. There are many I would like to get developed but I worry that they will come out blurry instead of crisp and clear. What is the normal size in pixels that develop well for 4x6 prints?
Is there anything i can do with Ulead Photoimpact8 to make them the right pixel size for developing?
thanks
one site says:
4x6 fair quality - 480 x 640
4x6 good - 768 x 1024
4x6 outstanding - 1200 x 1600
Upsampling the images yourself will get you better quality than letting the service automatically do it. There are many ways to do it and the best one is debatable:
what does upsampling mean?
I’m sure you’ve figured this out by now, but it’s better to just resize your high resolution photos later if you want to email them in a small size. Then at least you have the option of printing them in high resolution if you want. Unfortunately, though, you’ll fill up your memory card faster that way.
Upsampling means simply to increase the resolution of the picture. It’s a lot harder than downsampling, since with downsampling you’re throwing away information you already have, while with upsampling you have to create image data out of nothing. I know there are several special programs with fancy algorithms to upsample, like Rasterbator, but I’ve never used any of them before.
From what I’ve heard, the general rule of thumb is that you should print your pictures at 300 dots per inch. Meaning, if you want to print some 6x4s, your picture should be at least 1800x1200 pixels. You could probably get away with slightly less, but I think 640x480 printed at 6x4 would look like rubbish.
for the future, try a camera that lets you change settings like image resolution very very quickly. 
Casios or most DSLRs (even Canon?).
take test pictures at a low res and anything you think you might want at higher res.