Jman13 wrote:
360dpi is very fine resolution. That's a ton of detail even upon close inspection.
absolutely, but there's a diff between the file dpi and the printer's ppi (or vice versa, i get confused myself which is which).
in my case, i really only have 144 dpi of data in the file. no matter how much data you have, your printer, its driver or your program will uprez it to whatever the hardware's resolution is and the image size specified. so, i partly use genuine fractals because they do a good job of keeping sharp things sharp and smooth things smooth when uprezzing and have the printer do the last bit.
so to print 30" x 50", i start with a file that is 4320x7200 (aprox 31MB) and send a 777 MB file (21,600x36,000) to the printer.
millsart wrote:
Sometimes the internet seems to make people think they do. Their are "rules", that seemingly must be followed ..
Internet is a great source for information, but also a great source for a ton of BS
^ Here lies the truth. If there is anything I have learned it is that it is easy to lose any touch with reality once one starts down the path of "technical dissections".
Net is full of grey eminences of technical dissection of photography (which interestingly enough almost all seem to be coming from technical background and practically none seem to have any success as photographers, at least not when it comes to artistic value of it) with sometimes almost cult like followers and quite a few of them believes their way is the only way and that that should be shoveled down throats of others. Unsurprisingly once something is repeated often enough people start believing it at face value.
If one was to believe those one would believe that 17 x 22 prints are just not big enough to be treated seriously as pro work. Well, I had a pleasure of seeing Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis exhibition. Guess what, vast majority of prints were of 17 x 22 sizing and trust me, it can't get much more serious than that when it comes to pro work. So if it's serious enough for Sebastião Salgado’s it's serious enough for me and, as they say, "nuff said" about rules by grey eminences of the Net and what I think of them.
ecarlino wrote:
absolutely, but there's a diff between the file dpi and the printer's ppi (or vice versa, i get confused myself which is which).
in my case, i really only have 144 dpi of data in the file. no matter how much data you have, your printer, its driver or your program will uprez it to whatever the hardware's resolution is and the image size specified. so, i partly use genuine fractals because they do a good job of keeping sharp things sharp and smooth things smooth when uprezzing and have the printer do the last bit.
so to print 30" x 50", i start with a file that is 4320x7200 (aprox 31MB) and send a 777 MB file (21,600x36,000) to the printer....Show more →
That's why I get all my prints done from a lab (I use ProDPI now) and get fantastic results without worrying about all of that. I let them take care of it.
Jman13 wrote:
That's why I get all my prints done from a lab (I use ProDPI now) and get fantastic results without worrying about all of that. I let them take care of it.
I have found that making the print in the digital age is as much an art as it was in the Darkroom.
Despite all the technical/numerical detail I posted, that really is just a ballpark for me to know what size i can target (or how much data i need to start with). And even though i have a well calibrated system, I still find it necessary to make smaller prints initially to confirm gamma, color, etc and then crops of the full size to confirm sharpness, etc
I live in Chicago and tend to save my printing for the long Winters we have when i don't get out much. It's quite a bit of fun and the reason i invested in the Epson 9900.
The importance of any camera image quality measure is essentially a matter of taste. Huge grain, no grain, pin sharp, blurry, muted color, bright color, b&w, HDR, chiaroscuro, etc. It really only matters what you like, so you have to try it yourself.
millsart wrote:
Actually you are incorrect on this one I feel. A very small minority of the general public ever goes to galleries. Just ask anyone who works in sales, fundraising, or memberships at public/private galleries and museums lol
For maybe every one person who actually goes at an art gallery or exhibit there are a few thousand standing in line to see the latest Keanu Reeve's movie.
Within a niche market they do, I'd love to be able to take my 4x loupe to Ansel Adams exhibits, but the OP doesn't seem to be asking about fine art printing, sales etc. I assume if that was his intended output he wouldn't really be asking such a question in the first place.
For the average photographer, taking average pictures, and putting them on walls in the normal family home, to be viewed by friends and family, there likely will be no nose prints on the photos.
In my house, the dog is the only one who's nose ever touches the frame ...Show more →
I guess we all have our standards and they obviously differ. If you lower your standards...then there really is no limit to the size of print you can make.
As far as your discussion about people going to movies...you really lost me.
J.D. wrote:
I have to agree with millsart on this one.
The internet has been, in a good many ways, one of the worst things which has ever happened to photography. The reason being that it seems to have changed the very nature of what we do and why we do it. There are people out there whose sole measure of the success of a photo is how sharp it is. In more recent times it's been about "bokeh". Both can be contributory factors to the success or otherwise of a picture, Neither defines it absolutely.
What you find people doing in galleries is not a measure of anything beyond human curiosity. Photographers who shoot the sort of stuff you find there usually have a very specific idea of what they want the photograph to convey and viewing distance will be a major part of it. Resolution, sharpness and bokeh are probably not a very significant part of it. This is concept-focused and not gear-focused photography.
Sure, enlarging a photograph is as much a part of changing its impact as anything else we do and when we do it, we probably have a specific viewing distance in mind. How big do you have to enlarge an old B&W before the grain becomes so large that closer viewing is not worth it? I have a mate who shoots billboards with an original 5D. How close does the average member of the public go to that before it's no longer worth the effort?
If I enlarged something that big and people spent the whole time pressing their noses against it I would be pretty disappointed. The photo would be - for me - a failure.
It's not that people spend their entire time viewing the image from up close...it's just they get a different experience looking at the fine details in the image from up close. They usually start by looking at the entire photo from whatever distance it takes to view the entire photo at once. Once they take in the photo as a whole, they will quite often come in close to see all the different pictures within the picture from up close.
It's not pixel peeping, but just viewing the image details from up close as you can't see those details from far away. Just another way of viewing the photo. Personally, I want my customers to have a positive view of my photos if they choose to come close and look at the details. I don't want to put up some imaginary line from which they need to stand to view my photos.
douglasf13 wrote:
The importance of any camera image quality measure is essentially a matter of taste. Huge grain, no grain, pin sharp, blurry, muted color, bright color, b&w, HDR, chiaroscuro, etc. It really only matters what you like, so you have to try it yourself.
Exactly. By same token photographer's taste doesn't have to coincide with potential buyer's taste. It can happen that potential buyer like big prints but doesn't like "high definition". Which immediately makes whole "how big ..." concern pointless. So photographer has to decide whose taste has priority to him/her for certain goal, photographer's or of certain client/market, and take it accordingly from there.
And if it happens best fit for that goal is "big prints of high definition" that still doesn't prevent use of "small" MP count body. Like somebody already pointed out there is always stitching and some photographers that want high detail use stitching in combination with sharp lens to get to that goal.
chez wrote:
I guess we all have our standards and they obviously differ. If you lower your standards...then there really is no limit to the size of print you can make.
I don't think that word "standard" is appropriate. I think correct word is 'taste". And I don't think his being different from yours calls for it to be "lower". What makes yours superior and who is ultimate judge of that?
I agree with Chez. The way most people look at images (not just photographs) in a gallery or museum setting is to go in and out and alternate between overall view and interesting detail. I find it strange that that even is controversial. It's not prescriptive; it's simply descriptive of what people do empirically.
Of course if the overall view doesn't even engage the viewer, or if the viewer is otherwise distracted, this doesn't happen. But when it does, it's good to avoid obvious "pixellation" up close simply because it's jarring and disengages the viewer from the image.
(If you are doing conceptual art and purposefully want the viewer to notice the limits of the medium, etc., that's another matter.)
And about how many Americans go to museums (which is of course irrelevant to how those who do go look at images), I think it'd a stretch to call them "a very small minority":
There are approximately 850 million visits each year to American museums, more than the attendance for all major league sporting events and theme parks combined (483 million in 2011). By 2006, museums already received an additional 524 million online visits a year just from adults, a number that continues to grow.
renowood wrote:
I haven't seen a whole lot of digital prints in museums. They tend to be famous older long dead photographers that used that old medium called film.
aly324 wrote:
The way most people look at images (not just photographs) in a gallery or museum setting is to go in and out and alternate between overall view and interesting detail.
I have been to quite a few of the renowned world museums and I haven't observed people getting in _that_ close that "pixel pitch" would be taking priority over work of art itself (never mind the fact that number of them "encourages" / enforces certain viewing distances).
Nor did I ever hear anybody complain Da Vinci / Michelangelo should have used finer brush for Mona Lisa / Sistine Chapel.
ZoranC wrote:
I have been to quite a few of the renowned world museums and I haven't observed people getting in _that_ close that "pixel pitch" would be taking priority over work of art itself (never mind the fact that number of them "encourages" / enforces certain viewing distances).
Nor did I ever hear anybody complain Da Vinci / Michelangelo should have used finer brush for Mona Lisa / Sistine Chapel.
I'm not sure if we're arguing and what about. Normally nobody gets close enough for "pixel pitch" distraction precisely because photographers and museums don't print at inappropriately large sizes, i.e. what Chas is advocating. I never said the detail predominates over overall impression. People normally alternate between the two, taking the overall in and then absorbing finer details they find particularly interesting and then zooming out again, and so on. Do you disagree?
With oil painting the issue is more complicated because we're talking about historical styles. Leonardo was very interested in concealing his brush traces, less so Michelangelo, and at the scale of the Sistine ceiling there's really no need because nobody has access to it up close (unlike photographs in a museum). Oil is also a completely different medium from fresco.
People in museums do look at brushwork all the time. It's the whole point of seeing real paintings instead of reproductions--and most definitely not something to "complain" about. Again I don't know about what and if we're arguing.
ecarlino wrote:
The specs on the epson 9900 say max resolution is 2880 x 1440.
But are you saying the most it's using is 360 x 360 ?
Kinda. Sorta. Not really. Theoretically visual resolution on a 9900 is about 720x360dpi.
Ink printers don't really have a "resolution" limit. If you take a good quality loupe to an inkjet print you'll see that it's pretty much continuous tone. The inks blend together to form clumps of information, a bit like film. There's a pattern. That's the dithering. But essentially modern inkjet printers blend inks really well so you don't see "dots". Half tone and dot printers have an absolute resolution for the end product (that's where 300 dpi comes from - two passes of a 150dpi half tone printer).
Print resolution is in three parts. The capture resolution. The resolution you need for viewing and the best quality information that gets sent to the printer. You can't control the first (not at the print stage) but you have some say over the second two. Viewing resolution depends on the subject matter, viewing distance and the eyesight of the viewer. At 1 meter (3.3ft) not many people can resolve better than 180dpi. Some fine art printers use 240 dpi (60 is a common divisor) to ensure they're above visual resolution at normal viewing distances. You can use viewing resolution as a guide to you maximum print size for a particular file. But that's not always the file you'll send to the printer.
There's absolutely no reason you can't have a lower PPI resolution from a file as viewing distances increase or if the subject is low detail or even if you just want to push a print a little bit larger. Once you reach the viewing resolution adding more won't reveal more details to the viewer. However if you could put two otherwise identical pictures side by side and one had double the resolution of the other, even though you couldn't identify the difference in detail you could tell one is more detailed than the other. That's just how the eye works.
So you have a file that is well sized for 240 ppi at normal viewing distances as an image you then go to the third stage, which is to send a file to the printer that is optimised for that printer. With Epson that's generally multiples of 180. For Canon it's multiples of 300. For Lambda it's a 400 ppi file. This works as long as you interpolated up. Don't interpolated down unless you're really making a small print and you're hitting a 600ppi file. You interpolate between part two and part 3. If your printing from Photoshop you'd use the image size tool or a plug in like GF. You don't do this step in LR as it can do it on the fly with a very sophisticated algorithm developed partly by Geoff Schewe..
These three stages also match the three stages of an optimised sharpening workflow. Resize then sharpen for that new size.
So what if people go up close to view photographs? Do they then say, "Damn it, I can see the pixels."? Look closely at newspaper or magazine photos and you can see the printing dots. So what, do they then read the paper at that distance or look at the photos at that distance?
More people are interested in the subject matter or overall look and are not pixel-peepers. I don't have any nosey people go up to my 30x40 canvas prints and say, "Oh look, I can see the canvas texture.".
Maybe those that view prints at a reasonable viewing distance are happy with the whole image and don't have to examine it with a magnifying glass.
Imagemaster wrote:
So what if people go up close to view photographs? Do they then say, "Damn it, I can see the pixels."? Look closely at newspaper or magazine photos and you can see the printing dots. So what, do they then read the paper at that distance or look at the photos at that distance?
Resolution also depends on the printed medium. Some papers and canvas dithers more than others. You can't drop a splat of ink and have super sharp outlines anyway so the papers "help" create continuous tone in a way while at the same time "blurring" the image so you need to adjust sharpening for various media accordingly.
In practical terms I find that it isn't a big concern for normal or larger printing. People usually don't leave exhibits with ink on their noses.
