Print Size

[longside1]

Hi guys,

I am a proud owner of a Nikon D50 with standard kit lens. What I need to know is what is the maximum size I could print an image before it starts to loose quality and what is the best format to save the image as to keep quality or should I just keep it as a raw file?

I was hoping to get up to A3, what do you reckon?

Many thanks! L1

(BTW i would probably send the pic off to get printed as my printer is naff!)

[Nagasaki]

I think you should be able to ge an A3 print from a D50. You should aim for a resolution of 200-300 DPI and to get this you will need to uprez the file. If you are using the photoshop raw convertor I recently read that the best place to uprez is in the RAW convertor.

You can get away with lower resolution on larger prints as you normally view them from further away.


I would always keep the RAW file if you have space as you may wantto reprocess it in a different way later.

While editing the file I would save it as a TIF file. Personally I would keep the final version as a TIF file but you could save it as a high quality JPGwhen you don't want to do any further processing on it.


Ken

[longside1]

Apologies for my ignorance but could you explain what you mean by uprez? I assume this means upping the resolution. I'm currently learning my way through CS2 so any help would be great!

Many thanks Nagasaki!

[eric s]

You are correct about "uprez".

Software can do an ok job of adding pixels to your image. You need a very sharp image to start with, but once you have that you can try to increase the size of the image in photoshop. That will let you make a larger print.

But realize that if you were a bit off in focus or you have motion blur, then increasing the resolution of the image will only make those problems more obvious.

Eric