[sandrajordan]

Hi Beverley

My pleasure.  I have to say I am not the most technical photographer in the world but I know that that 72dpi out of camera is something that a lot of people misunderstand.

The higher the ISO you use the more chance of noise you get in your images.  Some cameras are very good at handling this at high ISOs but they tend to be the more expensive cameras.  It’s always best to keep it as low as you possibly can.  ISO is one part of the exposure triangle, the other two being aperture (the size of the shutter hole) and shutter speed (the amount of the time the shutter is open).  The best bet for you starting out is to keep your ISO at 100 if possible and start with automatic setting to see if that gets a good enough image.  You need enough light in the room to allow a good exposure and to make sure the shutter closes quickly.  The longer it stays open the more chance of you getting blurry images due to camera shake (a tripod can help with this but I am assuming you don’t have one).

No you won’t need a different camera to get images at 300dpi, this is something that your software programme does when you output to the printer (Photoshop, Lightroom, Elements – whatever it is you have).  What programme do you have on your computer?  Out of interest have you imported an image into it and checked the dimensions of the image.  It will say 72dpi but what is the length and width of the image?  If you change the size of the image in the box, what does the dpi change to?

You can take images on your camera and get prints outputted at 300dpi but, if you are going to consider selling the Giclee prints of your work, it may be better to get a professional to photograph the artwork, of course I guess that depends on cost, but light, exposure, focus point etc all affects the quality of an image and you want to start off with a very good quality image 🙂

Regarding RAW images, yes they do look absolutely terrible on a computer – very flat!   Basically RAW images capture absolutely everything you have shot but you have to then process them to bring out the best of them. They capture all the details but they need tweaking!! I always shoot RAW, it gives much more latitude in the processing to make a better image and I then have the control of how I want to process an image. With a JPEG you are shooting the same thing but the camera decides what bits to throw away and they get processed in camera by compressing everything.  I process mine in Lightroom, which has a built in RAW ‘reader’.  Photoshop is another option and there are others too.

Before deciding to get a professional in or getting a new camera I am happy to do some experiments with you if you want.  You could take an image in JPEG on your pentax and the same one on your lumix.  You could then send them to me, I will make the correct size and dpi for you to do a test print.  You could also take one photo in RAW (or if they have DNG option even better as I don’t have a Pentax raw converter so my computer may not read them).  I could process that too to look like your work.  Then you can test print all three and see what differences there are, if any.

Thanks for you nice comments about my website/work. I’ve had most of the year off from photography due to personal circumstances but am now raring to get back into it!

 

 

[sandrajordan]

Hi Beverley

DPI relates to printing and not digital capture. DPI actually refers to <u>printer</u> dots per inch. Even though your camera says 72dpi, that doesn’t really mean anything. The important thing is the pixel size, which i think on your Pentax is 4288 x 2428, that determines the size you can naturally print at. To get the best quality you have to set the camera to it’s largest setting, this will give you the maximum resolution for your camera. I assume you won’t want to shoot in RAW (as that needs more post processing) so set it at the Highest JPEG you can. I used to have a 12MB camera and took great photos with it that were enlarged quite a lot and still look good (although I only shot in RAW).  The important thing is to keep your ISO as low as possible so you aren’t introducing any ‘noise’ (which is like grain) into your image and to make sure it is not underexposed as that also gives issues when making large prints.

What size are you hoping to print at?  I just found this info on your Pentax camera which may help. Are you taking photos for inventory purposes or so you can make Giclee (or similar) prints to sell?

<b>Print Quality</b>
<i>ISO 100 to 400 images look great at 20×30 inches</i>

ISO 100 to 200 shots look great at 20×30 inches, with excellent detail and color.

And I just found this explanation on the internet for you which probably explains it better than I can!

——–

I’m going to offer my explanation from the print-industry POV:

1) Images captured via a digital camera are usually 72ppi. If you bring this image into a post-processing program without changing its values, it will remain as a 72ppi image, and the physical size is huge (eg: an image from the K10D is 136.03cm x 90.88cm. That’s over a metre wide).

2) For professional printing purposes, an image being prepared for print should be no less than 300ppi in resolution if pristine image quality is to be preserved.

Effectively, this means if you were to “squash” a uncropped K10D image so that it contained 300 pixels to every physical inch (300ppi), the actual size of the image would be about 32cm x 21.6cm.

From a practical point of view, this means that your photograph won’t lose any evident image quality provided its print-output size doesn’t much exceed the size of an A4 sheet of paper.

In reality, loss of image quality is not usually evident to the naked eye(unless you’re looking really hard) until print-resolution has dipped below about 200ppi. So you could get away with printing an image from the K10D to a physical size of about 50cm x 33cm (larger than an A3 sheet).

However, if you were to print the image at its unaltered onscreen size (136.03cm x 90.88cm) it would be printing at its original resolution of 72ppi, and of course the image quality would suck!

———-
I hope that has made sense and hasn’t confused you further!  However if your Lumix takes great shots, that may be an easier one to start with.