The Photography Thread

[DaiSuki]

Does anyone know what kind of image size is required to get a decent quality printout on, say, A3 paper? I'm not sure I've explained that properly - what I mean is, if I have an image which is 3,072 x 2,304 (or whatever) pixels in size, how big could it be blown before it starts to pixelate (assuming a professional print service)?

I dunno, maybe I'm oversimplifying matters here but I genuinely know nowt about printing. I have a frame which will suit this perfectly, and the source image is 11,906 x 3,348. How big will I be able to print that? To be honest, this particular image is blurred enough not to suffer too much with further increases in size, but I'm still interested in what kind of pixel count I'd need to print a good quality A3 image.

Any advice?

[bangaio]

My EOS 20d goes really nicely to A3+ It's 8ish mp and puts out files about 20mb ish (tiffs after processing). These are about 3520 x 2346.

I have however also seen mind blowing prints at A3 and beyond from 3 and 4mp cameras. The Nikon D2H puts out amazing files that I have seen at A2 abnd they blow you away and that's only a 4mp camera. I'd say you'd be fine to be honest.

I think from experience the file quality makes a great difference to printing, a huge huge difference. If you're going to get someone else to print for you make sure you try and get your monitor claibrated in some way so you have a fair idea of what the colours will look like. Even if you do it by eye with Adobe Gamma or similar it'll really help.

[DaiSuki]

Hmmm, and that's another issue. I'm colour blind. Is a print likely to be significantly different to what I see on a CRT monitor..?

Cheers for the help, by the way

[bangaio]

In a word, yes. Most people who print images for a living (and so many photgraphers actually sell prints done on ink jets these days) do two things. They callibrate their monitor and create a profile for it. This means that you see accurate colours on screen. The flashest way is using a spider or similar that is a ?100+ piece of kit that sits in front of your monitor and evaluates the colours etc and creates a profile that colour managed apps like photoshop use to display images.

Secon they have profiles made of how their printer prints colours. The two combined allow a kind of on screen preview in PS called soft proofing that attempts to show how the print will look and also mean that the print matches the screen which in turn matches the original scene.

You won't have to worry about the printer bit as it sound slike you'll get it done and you'd hope that a pro printer is colour managed so you want to make sure your file is as accurate as possible. The colours really can look completely different to screens sometimes. You can download (i think) adobe gamma which will let you go quite a long way to callibrate your crt. There are also other on line calibration tools but the URLs fail me at the moment!

Hope this helps.

[Magnakai]

Just a silly little note - make sure you switch the image to CMYK.
RGB (what your camera would capture in and your monitor would naturally display it in) has a different colour gamut to CMYK, which is what all printers print in.

[bangaio]

Magnakai, although printers have CYMK inks they are RGB devices. I use as do most people Adobe RGB rather than SRGB as the gamut is bigger for printing purposes. A printoing press for say a magazine is however CYMK. Nice and confusing! For the purposes of sending a file to a printer an RGB TIFF is your best bet if you can. Every time you save a JPG it is re compressed which aint such a good thing.

[Magnakai]

Wait, what do you mean they're RGB devices? They're designed to accept RGB information and convert it in-printer to the relevent CMYK data for the ink?
I didn't know that!

[bangaio]

Actually I think the print driver does that but yeah, RGB data is totally fine for printers. Most pros who sell their prints use 16bit tiff files (as opposed to 8bit which are more commonly known as 24 bit - 3 (rgb) x 8bit) and use something like an Adobe RGB colour space to use the larger gamut.

[MartyG]

Finally taken the plunge and bought myself a Nikon D50, I was tempted to go with the D70s, but having had a play with both, I didn't find the lack of a 2nd dial to be an issue with changing settings. Plus is was ?200 cheaper, and uses SD cards (of which I have loads) compared to CF (of which I have one).

Cost was a reasonable ?380 Body only (the kit lens isn't great and I already have plenty of Nikon glass), looking forward to taken loads more pics than I do with film. I still can't bring myself to get rid of my Nikon F90X Pros though, so they're staying in my kit bag for now.

[MartyG]

Looking about at lunchtime, I discovered this flikr album from a Philipine chappy with a PDA camera, proving the point that it's not your tackle that matters, but how and where you stick it

Linky

[PeteJ]

Nintendogs!

Not bad shots considering

[Ginger Tosser]

Either that or lunch! Nice shots though

[MartyG]

My D50 arrived today - though the manual is in French as it came from Pixmania - that aside, with the brief chance I've had to play with it so far, I'm very impressed with it, and it seems to work well with my Tamaron 28-200 zoom , which with the magnification factor changes to a 42-300. I will need to get a wider lens to make up for that fact I think.

One feature I really like, and I hadn't noticed on my other cameras is the thing knows which way around I've held the camera when I've taken the photo (I've seen this is even a feature of the budget Nikon Coolpix camera of a mate of mine), so ACDSee rotates it to the correct orientation automatically. It stores this in the EXIF info along with loads of other useful data on exposure and apature ( etc ) settings.

Please excuse the crap subject matter, but I wanted to post a couple of pics I'd taken with it, they've been resized and downsampled a bit from the originals, so they're not quite so large.

[Ginger Tosser]

Nice and clear pics. I do like the price of the D50, its what the EOS 350D should be. If it was i'd have one.

I'll have a look to see what bargains there are at Focus on Imaging 2006 next month (at the NEC). Last year a lot of retailers were knocking out the EOS10D quite cheap as it was end of line. I was kinda hoping the same this year for the 20D.

[MartyG]

The detail on the pics is impressive. I'm going to try some cool stuff when it gets dark with the bulb setting and a flash and make multiple ghostly faces