Re: Do you set your camera at high resolution?

Gisle Hannemyr offered these thoughts for the group's
consideration of the matter at hand:

You may be missing some quality in low-light. When there a
significant amounts of noise present in your picture, you can
improve the signal to noise ratio visibly by combining the
values of adjacent pixels on the expense of resolution.

Also, if your camera has a weak AA-filter, aliasing artifacts
can be removed by oversampling (e.g. capturing at high
resolution) and then downsampling in software.

Here's yet another opinion I simply do not understand. That I'm
aware of, there is no user-controllable setting for AA on my
Rebel XT, but there is for contrast, sharpness, and saturation. I
really don't know if it does or does not have a "strong" AA
filter, although at least I understand anti-aliasing.

That said, old-fashioned AA REALLY reduces actual sharpness and
detail with all of those off-colored pixels designed to fool the
human eye into thinking there's less jaggies. As to your comment
about oversampling, in general I would agree, but it isn't quite
that simple to me in practice. What I mean is, let's say for
discussion I shoot at 8 MP but decide to save finished images at
2. My testing has shown that a resample down that large can
destroy a good image, introduce artefacts, aliasing by itself,
sometimes even posterization and other undesireable effects.

There are mathematical theories and plenty of proponents for
resampling down in 2, 3, or maybe 4 steps, with mild smoothing of
obvious aliasing and mild sharpening between downsize steps. But
trying to put the theory into practice at my level of
understanding has proven elusive.

But these are rather special conditions. In general, provided
that you never need to print larger than 6.67 x 10 in (6 Mpx
at 300 ppi), 6 Mpx is all the resolution you need.

I have never been able to achieve total "system" quality in
images I process that will support 300 PPI, so I gave up trying
long ago. And, although we debated this for days, choice of
subject(s) you shoot and each person's definition of "quality",
which almost always is subjective, I find that for the low
percent I actually print, 120-150 PPI satisfies my requirements.
I am NOT saying I get super prints at that PPI, I CAN see the
aliasing, but at normal viewing distances for a borderless 8.5 x
11, it isn't nearly bad enough to bother me.

If you keep your camera set at the highest resolution
supported, please tell me why do you do that.

I shoot everything as RAW. Reducing the resolution is simply
not an option if you shoot RAW.

True. I'll bet, though, when the OP comes back and tells us more
about their camera and what they're trying to do, they may not be
even capable of shooting in RAW, and almost certainly not skilled
in how to use it. I do not know how myself because I know that my
standards for image quality don't require it and I just don't
have the time to devote to really doing RAW well.

But even if I had the option (as JPEG shooters have), I wold
have used highest resolution and best quality. Memory cards
are very cheap these days, so always carry a couple of spare
cards. I really see no point of not having max quality
available for a mural print, just to save the minor
inconvenience of carrying extra cards.

If one has a $1000+ DSLR body and several thousand dollars
invested in good glass and maybe a decent external flash, then ou
are entirely correct. I have 2.5 gig right now, which is more
than enough for a day's shooting, but then, I don't shoot RAW.
But, if one only has $100, $150, maybe $250 invested in the
camera, they may view $80 for a gig memory card to be excessing.
The problem with these open-ended "what's your opinion?" OPs is
that not nearly enough information is provided for repliers to
give an intelligent answer.

--
HP, aka Jerry
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Do you set your camera at high resolution?
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