Digital cameras aren’t like your old film cameras. You can’t simply pop out the film, drop it in a bag, and pick it up later. You will need to format the photos they way you want them, and choose the size you wish them to be printed as.
Choose the wrong size, and the photo will be blurry at best, or pixilated at the worst. The goal is to have a crisp, bright, saturated photo with black blacks and sharp lines. If you have a photo you would like to have printed, but you’re unsure of just how large you can go before the print is ruined, read on to find out the ideal print size for your needs.
Megapixels
Megapixels are the number of pixels in your photo, and determine the resolution of the picture. For example, a small two megapixel photo will have a resolution of 1200 x 1600 pixels. The larger the megapixel number, the larger the photos are.
Common sense says, the larger the photo, the larger the print you can make. If you are interested in making large posters, it is wise to use as many megapixels as possible.
Here is a quick guide for standard digital camera megapixel numbers:
- 6 megapixels will produce a maximum 6.5″ x 10″ print.
- 10 megapixels will produce a maximum 8.5″ x 13″ print.
- 12 megapixels will produce a maximum 9.7″ x 14.5″ print.
Optimizing Quality
While having a scale to correlate megapixels to max print size is nice, there are ways to get larger prints with smaller megapixels. The first method is to simply print the photo larger and max sure people can’t get to close to the photo – ie, hang it behind a couch or similar so that it is viewed from a distance. It will look perfectly fine from a few feet away.
The better option is to manipulate the photo a bit. This method is tricky, but if done right, it can give you very nice large shots.
You will need to upscale your photo using commercial software to a level that is greater than what you would like to print at. Then, process the image through a noise reducer, run it through an unsharpen mask, and then down scale it.
So, for example, you can purchase PhotoZoom 2 and upscale your photo a reasonable amount – as much as you can without it looking horrid. Save the image and then download Neat Image. Run the photo through the program and reduce the amount of noise as much as you can without removing detail. Save the image.
Finally, open the resulting photo in GIMP or Photoshop and increase the Unsharpen Mask to increase the quality a of the photo a bit. Now, downscale the photo to the resolution you want to make the print at and save it.
The resulting print will be much, much better than it would have been unedited.
By: Blair Mathis