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Charles L. Cotton wrote:
DPS doesn't accept prints electronically. I print them on a dedicated photo printer from a 4 MB file. I see the photos before they I give them to the students are they are excellent quality. If there is any doubt in my mind about lighting on a particular photo, I shoot it again.

Ah...so you know the pictures are excellent quality when they're sent. I wonder, then, how DPS is handling the rescanning. That's the only other place in the process chain where artifacts could reoccur.

Charles L. Cotton wrote:I shoot photos on a Canon Rebel XTi and use the highest quality (a/k/a largest) setting. My CHL photos are almost 4 MB each! In the last three weeks, I've had 3 students contact me about DPS rejecting photos, some allegedly are "grainy" and two "pixelated." They aren't. Each received a letter about the photos after DPS had the application for quite some time.

What format are you sending them in as? If you are using a lossy compression scheme such as JPEG, resampling them to 2" x 2" will result in the artifacts you've described. If you're sending them in a lossless format (such as LZW embedded in a TIF file format), then DPS (or whomever) is resampling them incorrectly.

I thought an example might be appropriate. I downsampled a 5184x3456 4MB JPEG image of a radio tower to 600x600 (assuming a DPI resolution of 300dpi), then did a screen capture of both. You can see the level of pixelation that may or may not be present depending upon the resolution of the printer and the eye of the viewer. (These were zoomed in to show details; one would actually have to print out the image on the printer in question to determine true image quality.)