Understanding Camera Resolution

People hate it when they need to squint to try and bring a photo into focus. No matter how tightly they press their eyes together, they’ll never be able to increase the resolution. That’s the photographer’s job, or more appropriately, it’s their responsibility to properly understand camera resolution. What do you do when you take a picture and it looks good on the screen, but when you print it, it doesn’t look quite right? Or it’s not as crisp as you thought it would be? What’s a good resolution setting overall?

Some of the questions are simple and some are complex. What at first, may seem like a fairly simple concept can actually be quite complex. However, that doesn’t mean it is difficult to understand or even master. This guide to understanding camera resolution will help both novice and more experienced photographers alike make sure that their photos look as good when printed as they do on the back of their camera.

What is camera resolution?

Before we can help you learn how to better adjust camera resolution, we need to first identify what camera resolution is. In the simplest terms, resolution is the amount (great or small) of detail that a camera can record. Resolution is measured in pixels, which is a small square of illumination on a digital screen.

Many people incorrectly believe that a blurred image is the result of your lens being out of focus. While it’s true that being out of focus makes your photos blurred, it’s a completely different aspect of the camera that is separate from camera resolution. Yes, you should keep your subjects in focus, but focus and resolution are not closely related.

An image can have thousands and thousands of pixels, all of which come together to form a single picture. Pixels are the smallest elements in a digital image that can be manipulated.

The more pixels you have, the more defined the image. Therefore, the more pixels, the higher the resolution of the image. So, when you hear people talking about high-res images, it means they have enough pixels to really make a crisp and well-defined image. The fewer pixels, the lower the resolution, which makes a picture blurry.

Image resolution can refer to raster digital images and it’s the quantifiable way of determining how close lines can be to each other and be visibly resolved. This concept is also applied to film images. For camera resolution, it’s measured in dimensions; for example, 500 x 500. This means that the image is 500 pixels wide and 500 pixels tall.

Resolution sizes

What is the optimal resolution size? Well, it’s really subjective. Many cameras can go as low as 256 x 256, which creates a very blurred and typically unacceptable image. However, maybe your artistic style calls for blurred images. It’s probably safe to say that most people do not want blurry images, so a higher resolution is preferred.

What most people tend to consider a good quality resolution is at least one megapixel (an image measuring over one million pixels). A lot of cameras get into the megapixel range when set at 1216 x 912 (1,109,000 pixels). This is a pretty decent resolution for taking pictures that you plan on printing.

A really high-end digital camera can snap images upwards of 11 megapixels without breaking a sweat. A resolution setting of 4064 x 2704 will result in a really sharp picture that has little to no loss of quality when printed. Other consumer models that get pricey can go over 12 megapixels, while professional gear tends to go as high 20 megapixels and above.

A lot of this has to do with picture quality when printing your images, meaning that a high-resolution digital photo will look just as crisp as an image taken on film when printed. To compare pixels against film quality, Hewlett Packard once estimated that 20 million pixels was roughly equivalent to the quality of 35mm film.

What is DPI?

When you print a photo that was taken digitally, the image’s dimensions are obviously applied to the dimension of the paper size you’re using. You can imagine that the same resolution would stretch out if printed on larger paper. Therefore, there’s another measurement you should learn about if you want to print your images: DPI.

DPI stands for Dots Per Inch, and even though it’s not technically the right term for digitally photography, many people apply it anyway. The right term would be Pixels Per Inch, but saying DPI is so commonplace that it’s just become accepted.

PPI (or DPI if we aren’t being stringent on the context) is the measurement made when the image’s dimensions are divided into the paper size. This is important to know when learning about resolution, because if the goal is to print your digital images and they are being printed blurry, it’s not necessarily because of your resolution setting.

If the goal is 300 DPI (the standard requirement of professional printing), then you need to know both the resolution setting and the paper size. For example, if you’re printing on an 8’x10” paper, and your camera resolution is set to 3264 x 2448, then by division your DPI comes out to 326 and you’ve hit your goal.

This is important to know since it’s pretty difficult to go and retake many images with your camera once you realize you aren’t going to get the DPI you want for a certain paper size. Do the math upfront if you intend to print the image you’re about to take to save yourself the aggravation.

Conclusion

Of course, the vast majority of people do leave their camera on the default factory settings which might already be the best quality possible. But others will reduce the quality to save on storage space. This is where you may then face issues when wanting to print your work. So, even though it takes up more space you are always better off having the best quality image possible. Hopefully, this guide starts to give you a good introduction in resolutions and DPI. But like anything in photography experience and practice are what will give you the knowledge you need.

Photo credits: Kav Dadfar – All rights reserved. No usage without permission. Dreamstime.