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Hey!
This is a question from a client:
I have a question, Kina ☺️ We were wanting to make a couple large canvases where the pics would be blown up. When I zoom them in they’re blurry. Should I be downloading them in a different quality somehow or something? I’m not very techy😆😉 They don’t look blurry until I try to zoom them in a bit.
I’m including one of the images from the gallery I sent them. I thought they were very good quality, the highest I can get, I think. ? Does anyone know if I did anything wrong resolution wise, or if there’s any way to fix this, or if printing companies are able to make them not blurry, or if that’s just the way it is?
Specs:
Aperture: f/5
ISO: 100
Shutter Speed: 1/200Taken with a 50mm 1.4 on Canon EOS Mark 5Diii.
Unfortunately, I may have shot it in JPEG by accident… I had to clear my settings and MAY have forgotten to turn it back to RAW… but does it really make that big of a difference when you go to blow up & print? I’m hoping not, but perhaps I may have just learned a good lesson?
Thanks SO much in advance! 😀
~ Kina
Attachments:
The picture looks to be plenty sharp, which is one of the most important points for good resolution. But what size is your original photo? This one you attached here on the forums is only 985×657 px which is very small to try to make a large canvas print from…
Do you have a link to the gallery so we can see what the client is seeing and downloading? If you’re not comfortable posting it here publicly, you can email it to me and I’ll be happy to check it out for you.
Your camera is capable of ~22 megapixels (5760 × 3840) so you just need to make sure that it was actually taking photos at that resolution, and then send them that file (after edits of course).
Unfortunately, I may have shot it in JPEG by accident… I had to clear my settings and MAY have forgotten to turn it back to RAW… but does it really make that big of a difference when you go to blow up & print? I’m hoping not, but perhaps I may have just learned a good lesson?
Keep in mind that “quality” is very subjective. A JPG file might theoretically have less “quality” (in terms of color and noise) than a RAW file (if you’re pixel peeping), but they’ll usually both have the same resolution.
Canvas does not provide a very high quality printing experience to begin with, so you can probably get by with less than the industry standard of 300 dpi, especially if it’s large and intended to be viewed from a distance. If you can tell us what size of canvas your client wants to print, we can give you some more precise guidance on just what dimensions your photo needs to be.
OK, @kina, after seeing your gallery link, it was clear that your client only has access to low resolution (~800-1000px) photos which are definitely not suitable for printing large at all! Further email discussion established that you were exporting your photos from Lightroom at 1024px dimensions.
So the solution (for printing) is to export your photos at their highest (“Full Size”) resolution from LR and send them to the client.
You probably won’t want to always upload Full Size photos to your web gallery, because that will take up a lot of storage space on your website. I would suggest that you use medium-sized exports (maybe ~2000px at 80% quality) for your web uploads, and then tell the clients to contact you for full-res files for the particular photo(s) that they want to print.
If you have any further questions, feel free to ask!
(See also this recent blog post on quality and file-sizes for JPG files exported from LR.)
@buddingphotographer Thanks abundantly for helping me out with this!
Yes, I had read that blog post previously. It was super helpful! I guess I just didn’t understand when I read it the first time how to actually change the quality settings on Lightroom because I had a different version. But now I believe I understand it. 😀
Thanks again!
You’re very welcome! Maybe I need to update the blog post to address more “modern” versions of Lightroom. 🙂
@buddingphotographer That would be great!
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