When Size Matters

by Linda

 

 

Printing our pictures is one of the more satisfying parts of this whole photographic experience. Whether you are scrapbooking, framing, selling or giving, holding the pictures in your hands and viewing them in the real world and not just on the computer can give you a sense of pride and accomplishment in what you have created. And I hope you are printing them. Even the ones on your phone.

The little cameras on our phones have come a long way. The one on my current phone takes pictures with amazing clarity. We all know how important image size is when it comes time to print our pictures and sometimes you might wonder if the pictures on your phone are big enough to print clearly. They probably are in most cases, unless you cropped it or used an app that degrades the pixels.

It's easy to see how cropping will reduce pixels, you chopped them off! There are some apps that will degrade the pixels of your picture just by adding the effect that you went there for in the first place, whether you crop it or not. You take a perfectly good picture and you want to run it through a favorite app and that favorite app will spit out a reduced pixel image. Why is that? I have no idea! (if you do please explain this to us in the comments)

So how do you know if your picture is big enough? There is a handy app called "Photosize" that will tell you. (for iPhone) It's sole purpose in life is for you to put a picture in it and it will tell you how many pixels wide and how many pixels tall and what the total pixels are.  That's all it does. After it has shown you the pixels of that picture, it simply asks for another.

This is useful information, but what do you do if you have a picture that is too small? One way I resize/resample a picture is with another app called "Filterstorm". (for iPhone, coming soon to Android) This is a good app with a lot of other uses, when saving a picture you get the option to tell it what size to save the picture and at what resolution. (try Photo Resizer for Android)

I cropped the above picture to show the pixel degradation from the cropping then I ran it through Filterstorm and show the resize/resample size.

After cropping -

You can see the total pixels are reduced by more than half.

After resizing/resampling in Filterstorm, there are mega pixels! Over achiever! I input 3000 pixels wide and 3000 pixels tall which is bigger than the actual image and I input maximum image quality so that is why I got so many pixels.

If you're interested in converting total pixels to megabytes, there are way too many variables to explain, compression ratios, ppi's, calibrations, whether it's Tuesday and so on, so rather than give you a headache, let me just say, try to save your pictures at the highest resolution possible. If you have to resize/resample, start with width and height of 3000 pixels each. This way you will be sure to get your pictures printed at the size you want, and they will look mah-velous!

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