Professional Photography in Cape Town

Understanding digital photo quality and file size: A ready guide for publishing - Magazine print, newsprint or digital medium.   Photo and content copyright Gareth Griffiths As an editor and professional photographer, up to 50% of the images Safrean Gareth Griffiths gets sent for publishing in print are of the wrong resolution. Here’s how you can be sure you get it right next time. Resolution Resolution means the size of the photo in pixels (very simply, these are ‘dots’ of digital information relating to colour and tone) that are expressed in a horizontal and vertical medium. When you multiply the horizontal by the vertical dimension, you get the digital resolution of the image, expressed in megapixels (what you camera ‘takes’). This should NOT be confused with print resolution, which is the dots per inch analogue equivalent of digital resolution. The trade has adopted two slang terms for the presentation of images. They are ‘high res’ and ‘low res’. Be warned that these are subje...

It is important for digital camera users to grasp the basics of digital image sizing. Should you be sending photos to the People’s Post or another newspaper, then a photo taken in JPEG format at medium resolution (around 5 megapixel) is suitable. However, should you need to keep this photo for printing and possible enlargement, it becomes important to shoot at the camera’s maximum digital resolution. An additional setting available on your digicam is compression or image quality. This is normally selected by setting the camera to take   “fine or high   quality” or on the other hand, “medium or standard” quality. Some cameras also have a low quality or high compression option. The significance of this setting is as follows: ·         Low compression means a large file (around 3 megabytes) on your memory storage card but the photo is rendered at highest quality. There is a minimum of digital noise or blurring of detail. ·  ...