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Printing photos - looking for suggestions


N

neolite

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Hi gang!

I recently bought a digital camera. Took some great pictures and would love to send them to an onine printing service to "test the waters".

I would like to get them printed at approx. 16 X 20 so I can see the quality of a large-scale print. Can anyone give me a recommendation from personal experience of a good online site where I can send my digital images to get prints?


If anyone wants to see the quality of the camera (and the luck of the photographer ;) ), here are the pictures. I shrunk them down to be viewed on the web. The originals file sizes are 8mb, these are 110k each.

Tulip

Wildflowers (weeds actually)

Daffodil

Peach blossom




Thanks,

Neolite
 
Ooops, forgot to mention...

The camera is a Canon Powershot Pro1.
 
Hi neolite.

Can't help you with an online site but, the pics are excellent.

Regarding the 20 X 16 prints. To get the best quality you would need to print at 300dpi which would require a 28mega pixel image. Don't know what the pro 1 is but, not 28 mega pix, I think.

At 150dpi you would need just 7.2mega pixels, but you're on the lower end of acceptable quality.

225dpi can give excellent results on some images but, you're still looking at a lot of mega pixels for a 20 X 16.

I guess you just want to see what's possible.

Good luck

Sark
 
I moved this to the photography forum ;)

Yup, good quality pics indeed.
Your canon can go up to some 3260x2450 pixels, which gives you best quality pics at nearly 11inches on a bit more than 8.
Acceptable quality can go up to a bit less than 15x11 inches.
Low quality can go to 21x16inch.

Anyways: this "low" quality" will certainly be at least as good as when you went with a slide to your shop to get that same size, and in all normal cases even better.
 
Thanks guys!

Erik,

With it being a online print question, I wasn't sure if it should go in General or Photograph. Thanks for taking care of the move for me.

I brought the pics and had them printed on 8 X 10 last night and they came out great. I can see that I'd be pushing the envelope to go much bigger. I think I'll be happy with 8 X 10 and leave it at that.

Also, I appreciate the kind words about the pictures. I wish I was good enough to even take a little credit for them. As I told my sister, I feel like I'm just a flesh-based tripod...the camera did all the work! :D
 
Question about size and dpi

Erik said:
I moved this to the photography forum ;)

Yup, good quality pics indeed.
Your canon can go up to some 3260x2450 pixels, which gives you best quality pics at nearly 11inches on a bit more than 8.
Acceptable quality can go up to a bit less than 15x11 inches.
Low quality can go to 21x16inch.

Anyways: this "low" quality" will certainly be at least as good as when you went with a slide to your shop to get that same size, and in all normal cases even better.
Click to expand...

Is there a formula that everyone but me knows for figuring pixel size versus print size and what dpi to set my pics at? I have to admit, I just set my pics to 300 dpi before I headed off to get them printed. I didn't realize I "should" only be setting them to 150...etc. How the heck can I tell? [confused]
 
Well, see it like this: when we see something, we see continuous tones and things. But a puter has to remember them, and therefore it chops them up like a kind of mosaic in which each tile, here called a "pixel", has a specific palce and colour (in RGB mode, a colour itself is chopped up into a specific brightness for Red, Gren and Blue which make together the many millions of colours we have at our disposal in a 8 bits per channel file. This is the normal file for PS7 and lower).
So, just like with a mosaic, the smaller the tiles, the better the detail. And this is also true for print: the more detail you have in your digital file, the more detail and the better quality you will get in your print. Yet, more than 300 pixels per inch usually is sheer overkill. So 300 is ok for best quality. 250 is also still quite good, and 150 is the minimum. As there are far lessdifferent "tiles" per inch, the detail will bge less. In skies for example you won't see this, but in, say, macro photography with lots of fine detail, or a portrait of a girl with long, curly hair, it will be visible.

Now this "resolution " (number of pixels per inch) is only important for print. Yes, you can set it in PS and a zillion other apps, but that is just because a setting is needed, and for making things easy for if you want to do work fro printing. You can change it at any time in Image>Image Size.
What *is* important is the number of pixels in your file as that decides how large your file will be. When you put 300 in them for best print quality, you need to divide your total number by 300. Same goes for 250 or 150.

So, a file of 3000x2400 gives at 300:

3000/300=10 inch
2400/300=8inch

Does this help?
IT is very important that you get the Aha experience on this. So iuf it is not clear, I need to explain better. Don't ever hesitate to ask more questions. (I can always ask for help!)
 
Ahhhh has been achieved!

It's funny. As soon as you showed 3000 /300 = 10 inches and 2400/300 = 8 inches I went "Ahhhhh"...then the next line below that you mentioned it!

Thanks for clarifying that for me Erik. I'm sure you must have laryngitis from explaining this over and over again. I think it probably doesn't sink in for most of us until it actually relates to something we are working on (aren't we selfish).

Thanks again!
 
At 150dpi you would need just 7.2mega pixels, but you're on the lower end of acceptable quality
Click to expand...

I typed this with the just bold thinking your Canon Pro 1 would be around 4 or 5 mega pixels but, from Erics figures it appears to be an 8 mega pixel unit....WOW, that's just greedy %} Makes my Canon A60's 2 mega pixel look like a baby :(| I envy you, but bet your're going to need a hell of a lot of memory :D

One final calculation that may already be obvious, the required mega pixels for a given size, as I calculated in my post, is simply the Height X Width of the printed image times Height X Width of the DPI...ie:

20" X 16" X 300dpi X 300dpi = 28,800,000

Hence my 28 mega pixels. Remember the DPI represents the pixels both vertically(height) and horizontally (width). Because pixels are generally square, the figures are the same and only one figure is usually necessary, but that figure represents both the height and the width.

Sark
 
but bet your're going to need a hell of a lot of memory
Click to expand...

I figured as much. I ended up buying a Sandisk Ultra II 1GB memory card. xfer rate of 9mb/sec. I figured that would give me the flexibility to save pictures in RAW format.

I took a few pics in RAW format (9MB each). When I converted them to TIFF, they jumped to 25MB each!!! [saywhat]

I haven't even begun to ask what the RAW format gives me compared to the standard JPG format. I'm still trying to get my head around the pixel "stuff"

Thanks for your help Sark.
 
Perhaps you don't know the best site for cameras: www.dpreview.com ?
They explain a lot in an understandable way, and your camera comes out top of the pops!

Raw means "what the camera registers" while tiff needs three channels (one for Red, one for Green and one for Blue) which triples the filesize compared to a single channel. Raw is something special, and is different from the traditional tif.

Jpg is a lossy format, meaning that (a bit simplified) it averages some of the above mentioned "tiles". Something like: "hey, these look very much alike and under normal circumstances no-one will remember that I consider them to be the same". And the more you compress, the more similar hues are considered the same. This is nearly invisible in skies and blurry things, but sharp transitions really suffer bad from too much compression.

I don't have a digital camera yet, but yours and the Olympus 8080 are very tempting. But I know that I will always use raw as I prefer to decide afterwards what and how much I want to lose data.
 
???

Thanks for the link. I will definitely take advantage of the site. Glad the Canon ranked highly. I did quite a bit of research before I bought, but I've always been a disposable camera kind of person (Erik shutters). I thougth I'd take the leap and force myself to learn about cameras by actually purchasing one.

I do understand that RAW is....well....a raw format. I also realized that converting an image to JPG reduced the size due to compression. When I was first considering a camera, you said "Save everything to RAW, then decide from there." I did take your advice. That's why I bought the large memory card.

I hope you make the leap soon and get a camera. I'd love to see what you could do with it.

As always, thanks for all your help! 8))
 
Now that the technical question has been answered ( kudos to all), I like to say I like the photos as well, good job :righton:
BUT
You knew there be a but didn't you [oops]
It looks like all the shots were done in the early evening? Lighting is the essence of still life IMO, If you get a chance, try to capture these shots again during the morning, while the sun is still rising. shoot them at different angles you'd be amazed at the brilliant colors you'll get ;)
Looking forward to seeing more images.
 
Night shots vs. morning shots

Thanks for the feedback on the pictures. You are right in the fact that they are all taken in the evening. I have to leave each morning at 6:00 a.m. for a 1 1/2 hr. commute to work ( :(| ). The only time that I'm home in the morning is on the weekend and it rained both days this past weekend.

It's supposed to be sunny this weekend here (Upstate NY). I'll take your advice and get out there and get some a.m. shots.

At lunch time today I bought a tripod (I'm starting to get carried away).
 
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