[pyritechips]

Hello good people:

I have been playing with a digital camera now for the last year and, thanks to Davey, have used my compact flash card on a regular basis to save my pictures to my hard drive. But I have yet to actually have any of the pictures developed professionally onto paper. Questions:

1) I am saving pictures at 1200x800 on the flash card. How large a print will this yield?

2) Can a picture be edited and saved back onto the flash card?

3) Can pictures be printed from a CD and if so:

a) Must they be a particular size?

b) Must they be in jpg or bmp format, or possibly both?

c) Can small, old pictures be enlarged and edited on computer, burned to a CD then sucessfully printed? In other words, how far can they be enlarged and edited before picture quality is compromised?

d) Can a picture completely created on computer be printed? I ask because I showed my Mom the collage that Melissa made for Remembrance day and she broke down and cried and said she wanted it printed. Can the collage in the following link be printed? If so can it be enlarged or if printed as is (600x453) how large would it be?

I apologize for so many question and thank any and all of you in advance for any information you can give.

Collage

~Jim

[gooley]

What photo editing software do you have?

[slipe]

1 – You will get decent 8 X 10s. If the camera has a higher resolution you should spring for a larger card and use it. You can’t anticipate when you will get that great shot you want on the wall.

2- Yes. There have been problems with some cameras, but it usually works fine. Better to use a CD.

3- Yes.
A – No. But if they are an odd size the processing equipment will crop them to a standard size unless you use a custom lab.
B – Most processors can do both. All can do JPG. TIFF is better than BMP and roughly the same size.
C – That is very subjective. Make sure to sharpen them in either software or the scanner and scan at 300PPI. You can scan at 600 to get more pixels but you won’t get more detail. You can’t enlarge a scanned photo very much.
D – No problem. Put it on a CD and take it to a lab. Nice collage. Don’t reduce the pixels when you make the collage if you want a large print.

[slipe]

Hi Jim – sorry about the terse reply but I was running out the door for an appointment.

That resolution will give a best 4 X 6 crop at 200PPI. That is as good as it gets from my experience. Some people come up with figures higher than that but I don’t see any improvement over about 180 PPI and I have a good photo printer. Lab prints would be excellent as well.

For the best 5 X 7 crop you get about 172 PPI which is also excellent.

An 8 X 10 would yield about 113 PPI. You would see a difference between that and a 5 X 7 but it is acceptable IMO. I’ve read posts by people who blew up 2Mp images to very large sizes in a lab and said people were amazed it wasn’t from film. I guess it has to do with how close you view it.

Generally people are successful putting edited shots back on the card and having them developed. You sometimes can’t get full access from the camera because of the formatting, but people are usually successful at the photo finisher. Just don’t dump the shots from the computer.

I think all photofinishers can read CDs. Wal-Mart and Walgrens have the excellent Fuji Frontier system and most if not all take CDs. I use “free after rebate” CDs for that sort of thing. Throw it away so they don’t get confused with a second session.

Most places like Wal-Mart and Eckards will only print in standard sizes. They will just crop an equal amount from the top and bottom or sides to end up with a standard size. Some online sites will print at the same ratio as a 3 X 4 digital image, but most local mass market places won’t. Someone on another board came up with some freeware that will crop to standard sizes for you: http://ekot.dk/programmer/JPEGCrops/ It is better to do it yourself in case the shot isn’t perfectly centered.

Some places have a maximum file size but at your resolution you should be able to save as a TIFF. If your camera puts out JPG it is best to avoid resaving as JPG if you can. Since your card is probably limited in size you might not get too many TIFF files on it, but a CD is almost limitless at your resolution.

I have found some techniques for blowing up small photos so they look OK. About 8 years ago my wife came home with a little snapshot about two inches square that her doctor had on his wall. I scanned it at 1200 PPI because I didn’t have more sophisticated upsample capabilities back then. It needed some cropping to get to 8 X 10 format so there wasn’t a lot to work with. I applied some very fine brush strokes (you can only see them under magnification) and then a small amount of smart blur in Photoshop. I increased the saturation and did some selective color. It was printed on matte paper and sprayed with some Wal-Mart clear spray paint. Suzie got a nice frame with garden implements – it was a picture of him with a hoe in his garden. His name is Ezra Greenspan, so I put “Dr Ezra Greenthumb” along the bottom in a contrasting green. He put it on his desk right in front of where the patients sat. The nurses said almost every patient commented on it and he always beamed. He was getting arthritic and looked virile in the photo. The man is world famous and I was very proud he liked it so much.

I have since found that just smart blur in small quantities works about as well. You always have to apply sharpening to a scanned photo and it is best to do it in the image editor as it should be done last. I have a program called Neat Image that does a better job of smoothing the blown up image without losing resolution. I read a post over on dpreview by someone who uses a little noise to merge the pixels. You will do better on matte paper if you blow up a small photo from my experience.

There is a technique called stair interpolation (SI) where you increase the size in small increments. It sounds counterintuitive but it really works. http://www.outbackphoto.com/workshop..._08/essay.html It is difficult if you can’t make an action in an advanced program like Photoshop though. I scan at 300 PPI with no sharpening and use SI to upsample the image. Apply sharpening last.

640 X 453 is pretty small and would be marginal even at 4 X 6. How did you lose all the pixels? I’ll see if I can’t work with it a little when I have time. It would be a lot better to start with a larger file and keep some of your pixels though.

[pyritechips]

Wow!

Slipe: I can't thank you enough for those comprehensive posts. There is a lot to digest for a graphics newbie so I will reread your posts and try a little developing and see what happens.

I am now experimenting with my scanner to see what I can come up with.

I will post back with some results and further questions soon.

Thanks and take care.

~Jim

[slipe]

You might want to read this: http://www.scantips.com/basics08.html Go on to the next page where he runs some tests with a shot taken with a 35mm fixed focal length Nikon on a tripod and can’t get any more detail over 300 PPI.

This blow up of the poppies in your montage is as good an example as you will find of JPG compression artifacts. The way you can get artifacts like that is to save multiple times as a JPG in a low quality. The artifacts multiply like rabbits if you do that. When you just “Save” you not only lose the original but also re-compress again at the same low quality. That really multiplies the artifacts. This is a good read – click on the JPG link on the bottom for more specifics: http://www.scantips.com/basics09.html

Once you open an image always save it as a TIFF, PNG, PSD or any uncompressed format. If you need to save as a JPG for uploading or sending as e-mail also save the uncompressed file and use a higher quality. Always scan as a TIFF – never JPG. And save at the highest quality your camera will give. When you go from fine to standard you are choosing a lower quality JPG.

I did some work on your montage. I have a Photoshop plug-in called Alien Skin Image Doctor which has a JPG repair. I lost a tiny bit of sharpness but got most of the artifacts out and re-sharpened. It probably wouldn’t look bad printed as a 5 X 7 but you would do better to start from scratch. I’ll upload the full sized image so you can download it if you are interested.

[pyritechips]

Hello again slipe:

Yes, I am definitely interested. Any and all help and samples you give are greatly appreciated.

~Jim (willing to learn!)

[slipe]

This will look awful if you display it 100% and have to scroll around to look at it, but it will print OK at 5 X 7. There is only so much you can do with such a tiny image that seems to have been saved over and over as a JPG. I can leave it up only for a couple of days as I’m storage overbudget on pbase. http://www.pbase.com/image/23649053/original

If you want a larger print I would start over and not be so stingy with pixels. Scan everything as a TIFF and save everything as a TIFF.

[sweets1981]

Well I went back into the editor and saved it for Jim as a TIFF.

It's 7.3MB. I zipped it and I am sending to him now.

Hopefully that will work better .

Melissa

[pyritechips]

Thx slipe- I downloaded the one you put up. I can see what you mean about the picture quality.

Rule of thumb makes sense: Create the collage as large as possible with the highest quality scans possible.

Hi Sweets and Jim

did you create the original as a tiff...if so then there would be a good number of pixels to work with...saving a jpg as a tiff creates a larger file but doesn't increase the quality...I don't believe...slipe will correct me if I'm wrong...

I saved the one Jim posted... printed it and took a picture of it with my camera as a tiff...it prints a decent 8x10 but not great

buck

[sweets1981]

I went back the the prog and the prog saves it as it's own kinda raw file image.

I then reopened it and then I saved as a Tif.

Jim has the zipped file. I don't know what he thinks of it now though.

[pyritechips]

Wow! Thanks for that effort buck!

I imagine if it was recreated with tif images then printed off the quality would be passable and an 8 x 10 is about as much as I was expecting! I'll see what we can do.

Your welcome Jim...
Nice Sweets...

that should create as good a file as can be expected...

buck

[slipe]

Originally posted by wanabe_buck:
saving a jpg as a tiff creates a larger file but doesn't increase the quality

I agree with that. Downloading a JPG and converting it to a TIFF doesn’t improve anything. Unless you change something and save again there is no reason to convert.

The site I posted the upsampled picture to displays only JPGs, but I saved it at a high quality after I worked with it. After the upsample, JPG repair and some cloning and color correction I did save it as a TIFF, took it to a good sharpening program and saved again as a TIFF and then saved from Photoshop as a high quality JPG. So I induced no artifacts between the original JPG and the final save. But taking either Jim’s original JPG or the upsampled one I posted and converting to TIFF accomplishes nothing as far as improving the quality.