{"id":5663,"date":"2008-09-28T16:03:51","date_gmt":"2008-09-28T21:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/28\/when-digital-print-enlargements-are-considered\/"},"modified":"2008-09-28T16:03:51","modified_gmt":"2008-09-28T21:03:51","slug":"when-digital-print-enlargements-are-considered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/?p=5663","title":{"rendered":"When Digital Print Enlargements are Considered"},"content":{"rendered":"
by David Peters<\/div>\n

With all of the advances in digital technology, digital photo can now be viewed almost anywhere through any medium. Most of the time however, you are going to want to print out your photos, typically on standard paper sizes like 4X6 or 5X7. But what should you do if you have that special photo that you want to make an enlargement of? Print enlargement quality is based on your digital camera mega pixels figure. Let’s look at how<\/p>\n

Every digital photo that you take with your camera has a certain resolution normally expressed as the number of pixels in the photo or sometimes as two numbers depicting the number of pixels over the X axis and the number of the Y axis (multiplying these two numbers provides the total number of pixels in the digital photo).<\/p>\n

You are printing these digital pixels onto paper each time you print a digital photo. If the paper size is big relative to the photo resolution, the quality of the print will be poor. Poor quality is often seen by pixelization or the ability to actually see the individual pixels on the print.<\/p>\n

So how can you establish what is the maximum print enlargement potential of a particular photo? The answer depends on many factors. Not only are the actual number of pixels in the photo a factor, other things can influence the answer such as the number of details in the photo and what the lighting conditions were to name a few. Plus as different people have different levels of what is acceptable in regards to quality, even the number of pixels can vary dependant on the individual.<\/p>\n

A rough estimation of what comprises a good print quality is based on the pixels density or in other words the number of pixels per inch on the printed photo. This is also known as PPI (pixels per inch) and it represents the number of pixels over an axis line.<\/p>\n

Experiments show that the following qualities are usually associated with a specific PPI number:<\/p>\n

PPI 100 – fair to bad<\/p>\n

PPI 200 – good<\/p>\n

PPI 300 and up – very good<\/p>\n

The next rational step would be to determine how many mega pixels are needed for good quality printing on a particular paper size. Don’t worry, calculating this number is very easy. All you need to do is to simply multiply the page length by its width in inches, resulting in the number of square inches on the page. Now multiply this number by the square of the PPI number and the result is the number of pixels on the page which is the number of pixels we want our source photo to have. Here are the numbers calculated for some common sizes (for 100,200 and 300 PPI respectively):<\/p>\n

page 4X6 0.24MP 1MP 2MP<\/p>\n

page 5X7 0.35MP 1.5MP 3MP<\/p>\n

page 8X10 0.8MP 3MP 7MP<\/p>\n

page 11X14 1.5MP 6MP 14MP<\/p>\n

page 16X20 3MP 12MP 28MP<\/p>\n

page 20X30 6MP 24MP 54MP<\/p>\n

This table is just an estimation of what is considered suitable number of mega pixels for different paper sizes. There are many other factors to consider when making enlargements. Experimenting with different paper sizes is the best way to go but it can be expensive. In addition sometimes what is considered poor quality pixelization can actually be a nice artistic effect which strengthen the unfortunate fact that in addition to the above calculation some common sense and experience are needed in order to match a specific digital photo to a specific paper size enlargement.<\/p>\n

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About the Author:<\/div>\n
Did you enjoy this article? Interested in Dominating Photoshop<\/a>? Well now you can by getting this free Blog<\/a><\/a>…what are you waiting for?<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With all of the advances in digital technology, digital photo can now be viewed almost anywhere through any medium. Most of the time however, you are going to want to print out your photos, typically on standard paper sizes like 4X6 or 5X7. But what should you do if you have that special photo that you want to make an enlargement of? Print enlargement quality is based on your digital camera mega pixels figure. Let’s look at how<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":97,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-5663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/97"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5663\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magic1host.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}