Dumb Artwork question (not a techie)

Your printer is correct: with a raster image like a JPEG (or a TIFF, or a BMP), the dots are either there or they're not. That is, if you wanted something that was 8 inches across by 10 inches tall at 300dpi, the original would have to start at at least 2400 pixels/dots by 3000 pixels/dots.

The person who did your artwork hopefully has a full-sized 300dpi original. If not, the artwork will have to be redone. Professionals know to work at very high resolution from the beginning, but amateurs often don't understand the situation. "It looks good on my computer screen" doesn't mean anything -- you need a ton of dots to have it look good in the physical world.

Sorry to have to confirm what your printer said.

Note, too, that while your printer can certainly convert the art from JPEG, nonetheless the artwork was automatically slightly damaged in the process of saving it as a JPEG. If you want to reuse the art in the future for, say, a web site and you need to save it at a different size but again as a JPEG, you will likely really begin to see the damage done by the format.

JPEG and Gif are fine for the screen, but are poor choices for print.

-- Matthew

Yes, you're exactly right, saving a JPEG again and again will damage it more and more.

With the programs you're using, probably the best format is BMP. It's a lossless format, meaning no data is thrown away when it's saved. Another popular format is TIFF.

If you eventually get Photoshop, saving in Photoshop's native format (.psd) is the best way to go, only saving it as some other format (under a different name) when you need something else.

GIF is just not good in general for anything but certain kinds of web images. It has a maximum of 256 colors and only compresses well if the image has large areas of solid color (no pattern).

-- Matthew