6mp enlagred to 12mp ?

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Pietrach

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Hi there,

I have a potential client who requests a 12mp photographs. However, these will be displayed on the website gallery only. My camera will go up to 6mp only. Do you think there will be a noticeable decrease in quality when enlarged in photoshop?

Thanks.
 
OK, my monitor is 1920 x 1200 which is a higher res than most. That equates to 2.3MP.

Your 6MP camera will provide about 3000 x 2000 far in excess of any monitor I know of. So for a website gallary it will be fine.

12MP is about 4500 x 2800 and is massively in excess of anything a web gallery could need.

Is the client just quoting numbers or do they understand what they are asking for ?
 
Talk to them about why they want that resolution, I think there's a good chance they don't understand why they're asking for it.
 
I am afraid they do understand. They claim that their future plans for the web site require such a big files. Hence my question if he is going to realise that he is getting an enlarged 6mp instead of true 12mp?
 
I smell a rat standing in deep doo doo.

I also smell a potential client who is thinking of paying for website-use shots but intends putting them to other uses.

Call me cynical. Mr Cynical.
 
2blue4u said:
I smell a rat standing in deep doo doo.

I also smell a potential client who is thinking of paying for website-use shots but intends putting them to other uses.

Call me cynical. Mr Cynical.
Click to expand...

Agree totally, I can see of no reason at all for a client to want images that size other than to print / sell on.

Time to find another client

.DAVID.
 
Pietrach said:
Ok thanks for all the opinions. Appreciated.
Any advice on the initial question?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Depends - there are fractal resize plugins for photoshop. They make it look much less obvious that a resize (with bilinear or cubic interpolation) has taken place.
If they are going to be picky, they can look at the EXIF data (assuming you haven't deleted it), cross compare with camera specs and see it must have been a 6MP image.

BTW - Are you the Pietrach from Pentax USER I gave some Cokin filters to a while ago (I gave up on PU after the magazine went phut and the forums became very saccharine)? If so, I have a spare K20D you can have - I upgraded to K7 then K5. That has a 14MP sensor so should do the job.

C
 
If you use something like photoshop to raise the res from 6mp to 12mp I suggest you experiment with a little sharpening on export. The results will be fine to look at.

But in line with the other posters try to (tactfully) find out why they want 12mp to start with....
 
Mark G said:
Keep in mind that an image displayed on a monitor is only 72 DPI and when printed it would be 300 DPI. Just resize to 12mp and then save it at 72 DPI so it looks crap if printed!
Click to expand...

That won't make any difference. A 3000x4000 pixel image would meet the 12mp requirement, and would still measure 3000x4000 pixels if saved with 72dpi or 300dpi embedded as the resolution. Unless you allow software to resize an image when changing the resolution, you can save it with any figure you like without affecting the image.

To prove the point, both images below measure 750x500 pixels and would both provide the same quality print if printed, even if the print had to be a little on the small size given the size of the starting image. However the top one has an embedded resolution of 72dpi whilst the bottom one has an embedded resolution of 300dpi.

070.jpg


070a.jpg
 
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Mark G said:
Keep in mind that an image displayed on a monitor is only 72 DPI and when printed it would be 300 DPI. Just resize to 12mp and then save it at 72 DPI so it looks crap if printed!
Click to expand...

A digital file has no inches, only dots.. ..
 
I'm probably being a bit thick but isn't there another aspect to this? The quality of the jpeg i.e. the amount of compression applied.

I've never really understood this myself so I just used a 4245 x 2830 pixel image (12mp) and saved it as a jpeg via photoshop four ways:

Jpeg quality Max = 5.7mb
Save for web high = 1mb
Save for web medium = 352kb
Save for web low = 242kb

The smallest file size is still a 12mp file, perfectly useable on the web (not ideal but not so huge it's unusable), looks fine on screen but will not look great printed.

If I was doing this, I would just resize to 12mp and then save as a low quality jpeg by selecting low quality in the "Save for web" dialogue. (You could do both at once that dialogue.) Or save it with the normal "save as" but select jpeg quality 0. You'll get a slightly smaller file doing it the "Save for web" way.

Btw, I know this doesn't deal directly with the original question about upsizing. For the use the client wants, by the time the image is compressed to hell, they'll never be able to tell it was upsized :D

Btw2, I'm not saying that you should compromise your image i this way - I wouldn't want to, pride in work and all that - but you could if you wanted to.
 
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