Losing pixels due to cropping?

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C

Capturingtheunseen.com

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First of all, there is no substitute for getting closer to your subject, but we all know that isn't always possible.

My 21MP camera produces raw images in the neighborhood of 40MB, more or less. If you aren't shooting in raw, that might be a good idea.

Also, if I have a tight crop that I want to print, I will export it from Lightroom as a .tiff file or .png file. Many labs will print those files.

If your image REALLY needs help, you can add pixels in Photoshop--a very easy thing to do. Then, send it back to Lightroom and either export in one of the files mentioned above, or.....send it to Topaz DeNoise for processing, which exports it back to LR in .tiff. You can then finish it up and export in either .tiff, .png, or even jpeg.

This is what I do; right or wrong it works for me and I have printed many images that started out as low megapixel shots.
 
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Capturingtheunseen.com said:
This is what I do; right or wrong it works for me and I have printed many images that started out as low megapixel shots.
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I don't think it's a right or wrong kind of thing and there are a lot of ways to end up with great images. But I really like your post as it's a good reminder that we have tons of resolution in today's digital cameras and you don't strictly need as much as some folks think.

I transitioned from film to digital with the Nikon D1H a whopping 2.6 Mpixel pro DSLR. Yeah, I'm not in a rush to go back to that kind of resolution and love the quality out of my newer cameras but with careful stair step interpolation I printed gallery images up to 24x36 inches out of those D1H files and sold quite a bit of stock and editorial images captured with that camera.

I try very hard to avoid deep crops for many reasons beyond just the pixel loss issue. For instance if I'm shooting a long lens and then also have to do a substantial crop then I'm probably just too far away and will likely run into depth of field issues if not issues with just shooting through way too much atmosphere, dust, haze and water vapor. But if it's Bigfoot riding a moose you'll bet I'll give it a try :)

Sure today's high resolution sensors are fantastic but if you just go by what's written on a lot of photo forums or even by the way editorial submission guidelines have evolved to higher and higher minimum resolution requirements you'd think that you just can't do a thing once you get below 16 to 20 Mpixels. But that's not really accurate and with careful shooting and processing you can get away with a lot less resolution than some folks might think.
 
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Great point above. Anecdotally, I've also had surprisingly good luck with "lower res" cameras and large prints. My favorite example is this image:

sit-back-and-relax.jpg
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As much as I hate to crop, sometimes it happens. In this case, the bear was a bit too far back - even with a TC. I was running low on memory at the time in my D4 and switched to DX crop mode to save some space. After that, it was another crop back home to get this - probably 30% or so. In the end, I think I was under 6MP.

Then a print order came for a 16x20!

I figured I'd have to issue refund, but thought, what the heck, let's try it. Using use Photoshop, I resampled the image to 240ppi and shot it to my inkjet.

It was AWESOME!

No sign of pixelation or softness when you put your nose to it. Looked like it was shot at full resolution.

In the end, while I think MPs absolutely do matter, I think that starting with a sharp, clean file is just as important and can allow you to pull of surprisingly large prints.
 
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Steve said:
Great point above. Anecdotally, I've also had surprisingly good luck with "lower res" cameras and large prints. My favorite example is this image:

View attachment 2137

As much as I hate to crop, sometimes it happens. In this case, the bear was a bit too far back - even with a TC. I was running low on memory at the time in my D4 and switched to DX crop mode to save some space. After that, it was another crop back home to get this - probably 30% or so. In the end, I think I was under 6MP.

Then a print order came for a 16x20!

I figured I'd have to issue refund, but thought, what the heck, let's try it. Using use Photoshop, I resampled the image to 240ppi and shot it to my inkjet.

It was AWESOME!

No sign of pixelation or softness when you put your nose to it. Looked like it was shot at full resolution.

In the end, while I think MPs absolutely do matter, I think that starting with a sharp, clean file is just as important and can allow you to pull of surprisingly large prints.
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Perfectly said, and what a beautiful image. If we don't get out of our comfort zone once in a while and push the envelope, we never learn anything.
 
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I am currently experimenting with Topaz Gigapixel to enlarge heavily cropped low-res images to a printable size. I haven't done a lot of testing yet, but my initial gut feeling is that it can enlarge an image bigger and more successfully than Photoshop.
 
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Rassie said:
I am currently experimenting with Topaz Gigapixel to enlarge heavily cropped low-res images to a printable size. I haven't done a lot of testing yet, but my initial gut feeling is that it can enlarge an image bigger and more successfully than Photoshop.
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I would expect the Topaz product to be much better than a simple one step resizing in Photoshop. Back in the day when even top of the line pro DSLR resolution was quite low there were a number of products competing for best method of interpolation for printing. I used Genuine Fractals quite a bit but also had very good luck with PS by using stair step interpolation. You'd basically do a series of enlargements, each one just 8% to 10% or so above the current image size and every few steps you'd clean up noise or artifacts as needed. It took a while but you could get surprisingly good enlargements this way.

I'd expect the Topaz products to produce results at least this good if not much better without the time and hassle.
 
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Rassie said:
I am currently experimenting with Topaz Gigapixel to enlarge heavily cropped low-res images to a printable size. I haven't done a lot of testing yet, but my initial gut feeling is that it can enlarge an image bigger and more successfully than Photoshop.
Click to expand...

I think Gigapixel will be my next software purchase. I just got Sharpen AI and DeNoise AI and already feel they will be extremely useful.

Another interesting thing that I have noticed regarding resolution is that everything always looks much better to me in a print than on a computer screen. I'm not sure if the inkjet process just naturally sort of smooths out the space between pixels or what, but prints always look sharper and less noisy than what I see on the computer screen. I'd be interested to see if other have the same perception.
 
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Rassie said:
I am currently experimenting with Topaz Gigapixel to enlarge heavily cropped low-res images to a printable size. I haven't done a lot of testing yet, but my initial gut feeling is that it can enlarge an image bigger and more successfully than Photoshop.
Click to expand...
Me too. I bought denoise, gigapixel and sharpen as a bundle and denoise and gigapixel so far are very impressive!
 
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