I can save it to a different sort of file - do you recommend tif?

Yes. Take your original source file (before you did anything to it), change the DPI as you did earlier, but then immediately save it as a TIF file.

These are files that other folks have emailed to you? I suspect that they sent them at screen resolution which is 72dpi and will look like hell no matter what you do to print them. If so you need to get them to send you new copies at the highest resolution they have.

I have nothing to add, sumi, except I feel your pain.

Thanks, everyone.

I figure that many of these photos were probably taken with less than ideal equipment (camera phone) and probably there is not much to be done with them at all.

Sumi as an untalented hack when it comes to graphics, I often find that low resolution images can be used as faded backrounds - deliberately blurred more than they already are , or made transparent faint backgrounds. Alternatively they can be shrunk into tiny images to be mixed into text as replacements for characters. Maybe some of the people who are actually good at graphics have other suggestion, but those are things I have done with low res images, and somehow bluffed people into mistaking the result for the work of someone with graphic talent.

Oh, and I've also alternated between images, checkerboarding them.

Yeah, but I'm not PRINTING them. I have to send them to media services to be printed and their requirement is for High Res pictures.

Ah sorry. Not helpful then.

I suspect that they sent them at screen resolution which is 72dpi and will look like hell no matter what you do to print them.

I disagree. It depends on how large the prints need to be. If Sumi is being sent images that are, say 1280x1024 (what you'd get from a cheap 1.3 megapixel camera), then as long as they're being printed at 4"x3" (or less), they'll look fine. It's not the dpi of the original photo that matters, it's the size of the shot in pixels and the size at which they need to be printed.

Help! As I've been talking about in Natter, I spilled some soup on my laptop last night. It was basically on the touchpad, so I thought I kept it from getting inside anywhere. No such luck, apparently, as my left mouse button mostly doesn't work any more. It has come and gone, but mostly doesn't do anything. I wiped it down with rubbing alcohol, which seemed to help short-term, but didn't fix the problem. Is there anything else I can do from here? I'm scared to open it up.