is 3888 x 2592 too big for a picture?

[MrMatt]

I'm shooting on my new SLR, at the largest size it offers, 3888x2592. My logic is if they're too big I can crop them later, but does cropping ruin the quality at all, with regards to depth of field? I'm just finding the 3888x2592 to be quite unwieldy when trying to view them at full size on my 1920x1080 monitor...

 

[ElFenix]

why view at full size?

 

[angry hampster]

You realize that your camera allows you to use different settings for image size, right?

 

[MrMatt]

just viewing at full size to see more detail. And yes I realize it allows for different sizes.

 

[speedy2]

Depends on what you're shooting. If you've filled the frame with what you want to keep, it doesn't matter how big it is. You're still gonna lose something you want if you crop it. If you're willing to crop a large image you must not be getting close enough to what you're shooting. My images always exceed my screen resolution. I usually post process at 25% or 50%. Unless I NEED to see details at a specific time in a specific area. There's really no reason to post process at 100% ALL the time.

 

[IGemini]

Cropping itself won't lose quality nor will resizing it smaller, though doing it wrong (i.e. changing its aspect ratio) could cause distortion. Compressing the image data too much will lose clarity, though.

 

[tdawg]

I'm of the philosophy you always shoot at the highest resolution for the most versatility. You can crop if you need to and resize images to fit your monitor resolution if you wish. Don't handcuff yourself by shooting too small of a resolution and then being stuck with an image too small to blow up or crop effectively.

Bottom line, memory is cheap. No reason to shoot below the max resolution of your camera.

 

[MrMatt]

good points! thanks!

 

[slashbinslashbash]

I... what? I don't get what you're doing here, really. For general photo viewing and editing, just view at whatever resolution fits the whole photo on your screen. Your photo program should do this automatically. If you need to do more specific edits then zoom in so you can see the actual pixels, but for day-to-day usage this doesn't need to happen very often.

This doesn't just happen with DSLR's BTW... 1920x1080 is about 2 megapixels. Any camera with higher than 2MP resolution will not fit on your screen if you are viewing at 1-to-1 camera-pixel-to-screen-pixel ratio. Let your software downsample it and fit it on your screen.... don't worry about the individual pixels.

Also, I'm not sure if you understand the distinction between "cropping" and "resizing." If you've got a 1000x1000 pixel image, there are two ways to create a 500x500 pixel image: cropping, and resizing. Cropping takes 500x500 pixel piece out of the 1000x1000 pixel photo... so you'll end up with only 1/4th of the original photo. This is fine for if you need to center on someone's face, or crop out something in the background or whatever, but it's not generally needed. The other thing to do is resize. You can "shrink" the whole 1000x1000 pixel photo into a 500x500 pixel image.... basically there's an algorithm that takes every group of 4 pixels, and merges it down to 1 pixel. It's simple downsampling, and you can use it to create any size image, e.g. a 75x75 pixel avatar.