The Frustrating Interplay Between Resolution and Print Quality
My photography results have evolved from grainy film images to some really lovely print-worthy graphics. I’ve gone from just shuffling through the pictures, to printing photo books, to printing images to hang on the walls of my own home, on to selling my images for stock images, large printed canvas images, and images printed on household objects. These last efforts have helped me understand the differences between what each of my cameras has been able to accomplish. Some of my well-composed and well-lit images were rejected by the stock photo agencies because they were too small. Those same images created limitations in what I was able to print them on for the household objects. The photos taken with my iPhone cameras have evolved as well, because of the improvements in the cameras in the phones. I’m still not great at iPhone photography, though. That’s another side quest.
The image up there at the top is a decent enough image. I really like it, and it was the first picture I ever took that made me feel like I could actually learn to be a good photographer. But you know what? Except for small prints (maybe as large as 8×10, but that’s about it), it’s essentially unusable. When I start going through the process of making it big enough to print larger, the image loses a lot of its fidelity, it gets grainy, and those distinct pine needles and water drops turn to mush.
Does Gear Play a Part?
I want to be very clear: a great camera will not make you a great photographer. You will still need to learn how to compose a picture, how to determine what the light will do to the subject(s), and the settings you will need to accomplish your vision. However, higher-end hardware is capable of producing larger images at a tighter resolution, and with fewer visual aberrations. It’s almost never going to be enough to just scale an image that starts small up to a larger size, because it will end up being horribly pixelated. When I was looking for my camera upgrade, I knew that being able to produce larger images was something that was going to be important to me. It’s not for everyone, and if you’re not interested in producing large prints, you don’t need to pay extra for a camera that will make it easier to do that.
I had 17 images processed and listed in my shop on Etsy before I fully understood what was going to happen when these images were printed and shipped to my customers. Fortunately, before I had made my first sale on Etsy, I started to populate my new independent shop online. The software for that site will reject images that don’t meet size minimums, because of the quality issues that will occur in printing a poster-sized photo image. I had eight images rejected, nearly half of the ones I had uploaded, the very same images that I had in my Etsy shop. These same images were among the ones I have at my Society6 shop.
I have a shop at a site called Society6, where I sell things like prints and canvases, but also mugs, phone cases, tablet skins, blankets, and other “merch.” In the Society6 shop, for one of my images I could only enable six products. Not wanting to put too much time into it, and not really knowing at the time that I had options, I just moved on with what was available. Recently, however, by making some changes to the image sizing, my options vastly increased – I quit counting at 25. Table runners, tablecloths, comforters, shower curtains, and certain types of prints are now available.
So How Do We Address This?
With software, and it’s gotten a lot more accurate with AI additions. Here are a handful of programs that can resize images:
Adobe Express is a free online tool. It has a reasonably user-friendly interface, and it will allow you to resize based on a percentage, or by pixel number, or to fit certain social media platforms. If you don’t mind the upload/download process, it’s probably fine for most purposes, especially social media. However, a file that starts out at 9 MB already is not something I want to pass back and forth over the internet tubes. I also like the option to work offline.
Gnu Image Manipulation Project (GIMP) is a free and open-source image manipulation tool very similar to Photoshop. It does have the capacity to change image sizes, but it’s not particularly easy to learn how to use. I have GIMP, and I use it, but not for this.
Adobe Photoshop supposedly also will resize images, but I haven’t been satisfied with the results. It’s also not free, never was, and now it’s available only as a subscription model at $20.99/month. Again, I use it, but not for this.
Corel Paintshop Pro offers a lot of the same features that Photoshop does, but at a single-purchase price point of $79.99, and I don’t have any experience with it.
The one I use is Topaz Gigapixel. I paid $70 for it and I’m making extensive use of it, and it’s working well for me. I am able to take a photo up to exactly the size I need without it looking distorted or pixelated. The AI engine is able to accurately make the adjustment from a size of 3456 x 2592 pixels to a size of 12000 x 9000 pixels, which is the size that my photography site’s backend admins recommend for larger sized prints. For smaller items, the size isn’t a factor. This program is soooooo easy to use, all of the control required to resize an image are right on the opening screen.
The main drawbacks to resizing an image are the increase in file size and the visibility of “noise” and “softness” of edges that you may not have noticed with the smaller size. In fact, unless I blow the image up to 100% in Lightroom, I can’t see it either. However, a large print will show it all. I have to other Topaz products that help with that: Denoise AI and Sharpen AI. Noise is the proliferation of little dots of “stuff” that you see in some images. Pictures taken in low light are notorious for noise, but that’s certainly not the only place we see noise. I had a picture of a lily pad that was really noisy after I increased the size. The Denoise program did a good job of smoothing out that fabric. Sharpen AI works well for those edges that look “edgy” when you’re looking at a picture the way we normally look at pictures but that look so much softer when you view it at 100%. It’s amazing that when I look at an image that takes up my whole laptop screen (and I use a pretty big laptop) and it looks great, when I zoom in to see how it’s going to look at, say, 30” x 40”, all of a sudden, I’m seeing a lot of noise in certain spots. (Isn’t that a funny phrase, “seeing a lot of noise?”) That noise is simply unacceptable for those large prints. It has to go. It’s better to not introduce it in the original image, which is probably something I’ll explore later, but sometimes it just happens.
Here’s an example of what I mean. This image is beautiful, decently composed, great color contrast, and, at this size, it looks like you can see every detail.
It’s too small in its original format, so I used Gigapixel to increase the size. Now here’s what happens when you zoom into it at the tree branches:
I lost the sharpness of those twigs!
It also introduced that “noise” I mentioned. It’s not nearly as clear here as it is on my monitor in Lightroom, but I guarantee that if I created a 30″ x 40″ print of it, you’d see a proliferation of white “stuff” in that foreground. Not good.
This was after I ran it through Sharpen and Denoise. I got rid of all that white stuff in the black areas and brought back the sharpness to the twigs but introduced a sort of surreal quality to it. When I publish the image, I’ll play up that surreality, but for most of what I would want to do with this image, it’s going to work.
These tools are great, but they do have limits, and the main limit is that they cannot fix a bad composition. Fixing minor flaws only works with an image with strong composition. I’ll do a post later that helps you understand a good composition, but I’ll give a brief explanation now. A good composition leads your eye around the picture. There are no distraction created by stray items. The picture feels “balanced,” that is, not all the visual attraction is in one sector of the picture. If the “feel” of the picture is off in any way, the best tools in the world won’t make it better.
Size doesn’t always matter, and if you’re producing pictures to be used in a photo book or in a collage of 4 x 6 prints, you don’t need to worry about it. But this is a business I want to take on, so I needed to learn how to get it right for my customers.
What are the biggest challenges you have in creating images? Or, what are your tools for resizing images and cleaning them up for production? Follow along for more discoveries I make on my journey.
My shops are https://www.oakwoodfineartphotography.com/ and https://oakwoodfineart.etsy.com , my merch shops are https://www.zazzle.com/store/south_fried_shop and https://society6.com/southernfriedyanqui.
