print image vs. digital image

Joined: 05 Sep 2005 Posts: 2 Location: Niskayuna, NY

Hi all!
A little back ground...
I am a real estate agent who needs to take pictures for business purposes. Just a few weeks ago I picked up a used Nikon Coolpx 5700. Let me tell you I bought this camera because I needed a camera that would take good pictures of houses that I could put on our Reator database without looking grainy (grainy is a problem I had with the old digital kodac I had).
Anyway, I read (studied?) the manual and started taking photos and let me tell you I am really enjoying this camera and taking photos in general. I want to start taking even more photos that I can use to make post cards and mailings as well.
Now the point to this post...
I'm having problems learning some of the finer points of photography that are not in the owners manual. I search websites and they all seem to be geared to more seasoned photographers...I barely understand the lingo!
1. Can someone recommend a good site for a novice like me?
2. The question I have been searching for is this, please advise: I notice sometimes I get a great image on print and a poor image on screen and sometimes it's the opposite. I have a feeling it has to do with pixils, but not sure how. Are lots of pixils better for printing pictures or saving them as a jpeg?
Thanks!

Posted: Mon Sep 05, 2005 11:38 pm

If you're looking for a good site to learn a lot about photography, look no further... you've found it.

I think I understand your second question, but let me rephrase it and answer... If I didn't rephrase the question properly, then I didn't understand the question.

You sometimes get pictures that look fantastic when you view them on the screen on the back of your camera, but when you print them to paper, they are not so great? And sometimes you get pictures that look bad on the screen on the camera, but print out and look wonderful?

Your assumption is correct, it's about pixels. A pixel is, essentially, a dot of color. When you take a picture, your camera stores several million pixels (1 million pixels = 1 megapixel). The screen on the back of your camera cannot display that many pixles, there just aren't enough dots on that screen. So, when the image is displayed on the back of the camera, it has to condense several million pixels into a few hundred thousand pixels. Therefore all of the information captured by the camera is not being displayed on the back of the camera... which is why the results are different from when the photo is printed. If you are using an inkjet photo printer, the DPI is much higher than what can be displayed on your camera (DPI= dots per inch, or pixels per inch). This is why images can look different on the camera and when they are printed.

The best idea is to load the photos into your computer before printing them (if you're not already). Your computer screen can get much closer to the resolution that your printer prints at. This way you can select the photos that you want to print, and ignore the ones that you don't want to print... thus saving yourself ink and paper.

I hope this is helpful to you... if it is not, I, or others here, will be more than happy to try again.

Posted: Tue Sep 06, 2005 6:05 am

Hi

danxt has already given you the basic information. Let me add some practical advice:

For presenting your pics on-screen, let's say on your real estate website, you should reduce the resolution of your images from 5 Megapixels (I think, that's the resolution of the Coolpix 5700) to a web-compatible size of 800 x 600 pixels or 1024 x 768 at the most. You would save those as JPG files, to get a small file size for fast viewing. (Be carefull to save these smaller images under a new name, so that you don't overwrite the original files.)

For printing images, you would want to preserve the high resolution of the original images. Nevertheless you would need to have JPGs ready for commercial printing.

To get a better idea, how the printed image will look, it is necessary to use a computer. A visual calibration of the computer's monitor (with the in-built tools of Windows or Mac OS) should be just good enough for the beginning. After this basic calibration, which will take perhaps ten minutes time, you get a good idea about image brightness and contrast and colours, though a slight colour shift between your monitor and the final print is more than likely.

If, over time you are getting more involved with photography, you should invest in the Adobe Photoshop Elemts 3 software and a good basic "Hot to" book. You'll soon discover, that you really can improve your images with only a couple of minutes work on the computer. And you will discover new uses for your real estate marketing as well...

regards, René

Joined: 05 Sep 2005 Posts: 2 Location: Niskayuna, NY

danxt,
When I said screen, I meant computer screen...better yet, I should have said uploading them onto the web.
However, you did teach me everything I know about pixils, so thank you very much.
So let me see if I've got this straight....for uploading pictures from my camera to my computer and then onto the web, I should use 640x480.
As for uploading pictures from the camera on the computer and then printing them out on my camera I should use 1600x1200 or for a large picture, 2560x1920. If I'm sending pictures by email to be commercially printed I would want to shoot them in the higher resolution of about 1600x1200 as well.
So...5 megapixils is considered high resolution and 1 megapixil is lower resolution...do I have the lingo down?
Thanks!

Joined: 26 Aug 2005 Posts: 232 Location: N.California

<<1. Can someone recommend a good site for a novice like me? >>

I highly recommend you go to the public library and borrow a book on photography. Digital is fundamentally the same as classic film-based photography. Digital has some new nuances, but learn the fundamentals first. And reading the book to get the fundamental is going to be much faster than picking one topic at a time and trying to parse thru conflicting opinions and methods of those posting on forums! Once you have the fundamentals, you are better equipped to sometimes challenge what others say on a topic, when you ask in the forums!

<<2. The question I have been searching for is this, please advise: I notice sometimes I get a great image on print and a poor image on screen and sometimes it's the opposite. I have a feeling it has to do with pixils, but not sure how. Are lots of pixils better for printing pictures or saving them as a jpeg? >>

Monitors and printed pictures need to be calibrated to each other to get consistent results. You are simply seeing evidence of the fact that LCD or CRT and printers form images in very different ways.
That is why some, who are finicky about getting exactly what they see on the monitor to be reproduced in the print, will insist on printing on their own photo printer rather than sending it out to a commercial print maker.