how to maintain or increase resolution of a photo when cropping it t ?

suhelabbas73 wrote on 4/22/2012, 1:45 PM

Good day all, I was wondering if any one knows how to go about cropping photos while maintaing or increasing the resolution of it .........I'm trying to create a shutterfly photo pic for my wedding, but the photograher was the worst ever so most of the wedding pictures were really bad and need enhancing and cropping....on a digital copy pictures can look really nice, but when I try to print them out or arrange them in a photo book ( most pictures must be enlarged after being cropped ) the resolution seems low and pictures come out pixelated..... is there an option or a fix for that? .........thyanks for your and advice in advance :).

Comments

johnebaker wrote on 4/22/2012, 6:08 PM

Unfortunately if you have not got the required number of pixels in the image then increasing the resolution to try to improve the quality will not work. For instance if you double the resolution horizontally and vertically, then you effectively spread the colour of 1 pixel over 4 pixels, you do not gain intermediate pixels for example where there is a colour change

As a rough guide to how big you can print an image, divide the image resolution by 150 for reasonable prints or 300 for high quality.

So if you crop an image to 1500 x 1200 px the you should be able to get a reasonable print 10 x 8 inches or a higher quality at 5 x 4 in. however see below.

Depending on what adjustments you have also made the quality may be considerably poorer, especially if the images are dark and you have applied significant gamma or brightness and contrast corrections - digital camera noise rears it ugly head and is virtually impossible to get rid of.

Improvement can be achieved using sharpening, however this must be the last adjustment made prior to printing and I recommend doing this on a copy of the image after all other adjustments have been made.

Once an image has been sharpened don't try making adjustments afterwards.

John