I have designed a custom deck of cards and I want to send my designs to print. It took me a few weeks to complete my designs using GIMP. I'm new to digital design and made a mistake – I did not set the DPI for the canvas and my designs are set to 96DPI. 

**What do I need to do to ensure I get high quality prints?**

Here's an outline of my project ad what I've done to this point:

* The requirements are 822x1122 at 300dpi
* I did an experiment and the results are confusing to me
* I took a large image from the internet (1280x1008), opened GIMP with
a 300DPI canvas and scaled the image to 500x394 and saved it
* I opened GIMP with a 96DPI canvas and scaled the same image to  

500x394 and saved it then copied the image from the 96DPI canvas and
pasted it into the 300DPI canvas.

I thought the 96DPI image would shrink on the 300DPI canvas however both images appear exactly the same in size and pixelation when zoomed in.

**Are these images the same quality?**

I could create new 300DPI canvases and paste my 96DPI designs into it but surely the data is already lost, but images scaled to a 300DPI to begin with do not look any better than my 96DPI images.