BetterPhoto Q&A
Category: Explain Digital Resolution

Photography Question 

Gretchen D. Solomon
 

I Can See The Pixels In My Piictures


I am shooting with the Canon 10D. I have had wonderful luck in the past few months and all of my pictures have turned out great. The images are large and are brought in as jpegs. I burn the ones I like and on a CD and take them to a local lab for developing. All of which has worked perfect until now. I got a whole series of pictures back and the megapixels are showing in the faces of the portraits. First of all how or can I fix it and second how to I keep from doing this again?


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December 12, 2003

 

doug Nelson
  If you're shooting for printing, you have an excellent camera. Just be sure you are setting a high enough quality level to keep this from happening. Try to isolate the problem that caused this, whether it was inadvertantly setting a wrong setting, overcompressing the JPEG's, or editing them too many times with too many Edits and Saves, thereby causing them to look as if they were made of LEGO blocks.

For the best possible image quality, have you tried shooting in raw mode and high bit color, doing the brightness/contrast/color correction in Photoshop and only then doing the switch to 8-bit and to TIF? JPEG is for sending and posting to the web, although some people get away with multiple edits and are getting decent prints.


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December 13, 2003

 

Vik Orenstein
  I've have gotten similar problems on the highlight areas of white clothing and objects when using strobes and being less than meticulous about my exposures. If your skintones are the lightest part of your shot and the lighting set-up is contrasty (a lot of side to side contour, for instance,) and you're over exposing EVEN JUST A LITTLE BIT this could be your problem --especially if your subjects are moving around a lot toward your light source. You can check this theory by looking at any shots with multiple subjects and comparing the faces --are the ones closest to a light source the ones with the mega pixels?


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December 20, 2003

 

Wing Wong
  Hmm... the Canon 10D is a 6.3MP digital camera. Unless you were cropping heavily, taking pictures at a low resolution mode on your camera, using ALOT of Jpeg compression, or the photo place did something weird to your shot, you should not be seing pixels in a digital print from a 6.3MP camera.

I had an Olympus C2100UZ which was a 2.1MP camera and did 8"x10" blowups at home on my Epson printer and did not see pixels unless I looked closely(4" from face).
Overexposure CAN affect the look of the picture, but it shouldn't pixelate your image to the point where you can see the pixels in the final output. :
Gretchen, if you want, I can take a look at one of the JPEGs you archived and had printed to see what's up. I'm curious since the 10D is a pro-grade camera and shouldn't have that problem.


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February 13, 2004

 

Gregg Vieregge
  If your cropping in Photoshop make sure the DPI is 300 and not 72. Check image, image size and make sure the DPI is 300. Sometimes the programs will default to 72 DPI which will show pixels.


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February 17, 2004

 

Wing Wong
  Hmm.. I forget if the 10D has a histogram function or not. But when taking pictures, try to check the histogram readout on a picture you have taken.

If the histogram is running off the left or right side, then you have blown out your highlights or seriously underexposed your shadows.

Check out http://www.luminous-landscape.com and look for the article "exposing to the right". It talks about histogram assisted exposure and metering to avoid blown highlights and to make the most use of your camera's internal capture bits.

The only other issue which comes to mind is repeated saving/editing in JPEG mode will degrade your image over time since JPEG is a lossy compression format. An alternative might be to work in TIFF or PSD format until you are ready to output to web or print. That way, you do not compound the jpeg artifact blocking.

Since you are using the 10D, another option would be to have the camera do the RAW+JPEG capture mode so that you have a JPEG to review and a high quality RAW image to work from and save to CD.

Working with a TIFF image extracted from RAW with either Canon's viewer/browser, CaptureOne's conversion software, Adobe PS CS's raw plugin, or the opensource dcraw convertor will ensure that your images will be as artifact free as possible.

But the histogram can be a very useful tool if your highlights are getting blown often.


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February 18, 2004

 

Jan Day
 
 
 
Is this what you mean?


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May 01, 2006

 

Justin G.
  my bets on the ISO. what where you shooting at?


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May 02, 2006

 

Jan Day
  I shoot at 200, sometimes 100 - no higher.


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May 02, 2006

 

Justin G.
  I fold my bet.


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May 04, 2006

 
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