Why resolution doesnt matter

Basically, when it comes to printing your images, you should pay attention to dpi dots per inch or ppi pixel per inch , and not your sensor size. It basically comes down to the viewing distance. But this changes if you make a large print, for example a billboard. You should step away so you can see the entire image. If you want to read more information about dpi and ppi, you can do it in this article.

Dunja Djudjic is a writer and photographer from Novi Sad, Serbia. You get more detail in the space of your screen because there are more dots to display the details of the images. Sometimes a good example does what words will never do. Why no letter A? There is no letter A because there are no more dots than the single dot we used. That looks like an A. The more we increase the resolution of the graphic, the clearer the A becomes.

That is to say, I cannot improve upon its quality because my laptop cannot display images at a higher resolution than that. You can cheat resolution and make an image seem smoother than it otherwise would by using a technique known as anti-aliasing. This smooths out the jagged edges in text, or angled lines in your image. I've turned on anti-aliasing for this last 'A' and you'll see it appears smoother.

Also, it's possible to 'cheat' and that's what LCD screens do - each pixel is made up of small red, green and blue sub-pixels like the image at the top of this article.

By cleverly changing the amount of red,green and blue, a computer screen can manipulate the sub-pixels to give the illusion of having a higher resolution. That results in a better image. Microsoft calls this Clear Type and it's mostly used for text. Resolution starts to become a bit more complicated when you want to print your images.

Which one is right? What should you use to get the best quality? Print resolution tends to be much larger than screen resolution. You can fit more 'pixels' in a printed photo than you can fit on a screen. Because of this, you should never print your image at the same resolution of the screen you are viewing it on. Most computer monitors display images at 72 dots per inch. When you print, you should be anywhere from dots per inch up to 1, dots per inch with the most sophisticated equipment.

You can easily get a digital camera that meets the basic resolution requirements, which is somewhere around 6 megapixels for most printing and viewing. This is what Photoshop and Lightroom at least use in their export settings—unless something changed… and what should be refered to when talking about images on a screen.

DPI stands for "dots per inch" and it's referring to scanners and printers. For example: file has a resolution of ppi but it will be printed dpi Unless you have a monitor with dots not pixels..

In a way, you're right but you're also terribly wrong The big bugaboo in years past, and even still today, was the actual size the file took up on the disk and subsequently had to be transmitted over telephone lines. Make your file too big and doom it to never be seen on the web. This is why webmasters would tell the graphic designers to limit the resolution to It gave a file size that would, normally, be small enough to transmit over the web in our lifetime.

Even then, conversion tools would be used to compress the image to make the file size smaller. Faster load times equals more visitor happiness. Until everyone in the world, or at least your intended audience, has a high speed connection to the Internet, the time it takes to download your image, which is directly related to the disk space used, will be important.

Of course, if you never intend on putting your image on the web, then my point is mute. Pixel dimension and compression affect file size. If you're specifying a pixel dimension on output, your resolution has no bearing on file size. Don't believe me? Try it yourself. Please don't add to the confusion James. As Mike says, try outputting an image set to ppi, and the same image with the same settings, and same pixel dimensions, but set to 30,ppi.

Unfortunately that is rarely the case. First of, 4K is still not the broad standard yet. Because 4K has been around for over a decade and camera manufacturers had plenty of time to get the best out of it. Finishing an 8K recording in 4K to be able to use the extra resolution to crop in or re-frame a shot can be useful.