Here is how the image looks like when viewed at 400%:Īs you can see, it is very “pixelated”, meaning that there are lots of squares in the image. It has plenty of details and is very sharp, so it is a good sample to test. Here is a bird image I picked that I shot earlier this year: NIKON D3S 300mm, ISO 1400, 1/1600, f/7.1 Let’s jump to a real example and see what we get by enlarging a photograph using Photoshop. If I change the value from 240 to 300 DPI, the print size gets lowered to 13.653″ x 10.24″, while keeping the image size the same. As I increased the size, the middle section is pointing out that if I printed that photograph at 240 DPI, I would get a 17.067″ x 12.8″ print size. In the above example, I took an image that was 1024 x 768 and quadrupled its size by changing the width to 4096 (the height automatically changes since I have “Constrain Proportions” checked). The initial width and height indicate the size of the image you loaded into Photoshop. Once you open an image and go to Image Size, you will see something like this: The tool within Photoshop to enlarge images is called “Image Size” and it is available under Image->Image Size in the top navigation menu. Let’s take a look at the two most frequently used methods to enlarge images by professionals.Ģ) Enlarging Images Using Adobe PhotoshopĪdobe Photoshop is the most popular graphic program used for enlarging images. The new advancements in digital image processing are now allowing much larger prints with minimum loss of quality and details. With the invention of digital photography, everything is now different, at times more complicated with all the DPI/PPI language and image resizing options with different algorithms. Printing photographs during the film days was pretty easy – photographers already knew the print size from 35mm or medium format films and it was easy to find out what sizes could be printed without losing much details and sharpness.
So, does it mean that you are limited to such small prints with your DSLR camera? What if you want to hang your beautiful picture on a 24″ x 36″ frame? This is where proper image resizing can help you achieve great results with your prints. Going below 240 DPI, however, is not acceptable by most photographers due to loss of quality and “fuzziness” or “blur” (if the image is not properly resized) in the images. Some professional photographers print at 240 DPI and find it pretty good for the work they sell, so you could go a little lower. If you wanted to make the highest quality print for publication in a magazine at 300 DPI, you could easily print a full standard 8″ x 10″ page and could even afford cropping the image to fully fit the page or print at non-standard sizes all the way to 14.3″ x 9.5″. Given the above information, how large could you print an image from the Nikon D90 camera? Now that you know what dots per inch means, the first question that needs to be asked, is how good of a quality the print should be. 300 dots per inch gives magazine-quality prints, while lower numbers below 150 introduce more grain and fuzziness to the printed image.
The more the number of “dots” per square inch, the more dense and close to each other the printed dots will be, resulting in smooth transitions and less space between those dots and therefore less “grain”. Why divide by 300 and what does that number mean? This number represents “DPI” (dots per inch) or “PPI” (pixels per inch), which means how many dots/pixels per inch the printer will print on paper. So in the above case with the D90, dividing 4,288 and 2,848 by 300 gives 14.3 x 9.5 inch size prints. If you multiply these numbers together, you will get to 12,212,224 pixels or 12.2 megapixels – the total number of pixels available on the sensor. This literally means that there are 4,288 horizontal pixels and 2,848 vertical pixels on the image sensor. For example, if you are shooting with the Nikon D90 camera, the image resolution is 4,288 (width) x 2,848 (height). Traditionally, the rule has been to divide the width of the image in pixels by 300 to get the highest quality print size in inches. One of the most frequently asked questions by photographers who do not have much experience with the printing process is how big they can print their photographs from their DSLR cameras.
Enlarging Images Using Genuine Fractals.