upping the resolution for the Canon 450D

Hi everyone,

Just signed on to the site and found some useful information.

I enjoy photography and have recently upgraded my sony Cybershot (8Meg) to a Canon 450D DSLR to really tap in on the creative side.

Anyway I have recently used it and am happy with some of the shots already.
But when viewing them in Photoshop I noticed the resolution of the pictures were at 72dpi.
This is fine when photos are printed at 6"X4" but anything bigger the prints will drop in detail.

I have checked the manual to see what I can do to bump the resolution up but have not been successful.

Can anyone suggest anything - I would like to get my pics up to at least 300dpi.

Thanks

Until you print it (or possibly with some web applications???) DPI doesn't mean a thing. Only the pixel resolution matters for digital viewing. If you are going to print it or send it to a printer, you should change the DPI in PS without changing anything else (all this does is change the number). – TF

Quote:

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Originally Posted by cabsurfer

Hi everyone,

Just signed on to the site and found some useful information.

I enjoy photography and have recently upgraded my sony Cybershot (8Meg) to a Canon 450D DSLR to really tap in on the creative side.

Anyway I have recently used it and am happy with some of the shots already.
But when viewing them in Photoshop I noticed the resolution of the pictures were at 72dpi.
This is fine when photos are printed at 6"X4" but anything bigger the prints will drop in detail.

I have checked the manual to see what I can do to bump the resolution up but have not been successful.

Can anyone suggest anything - I would like to get my pics up to at least 300dpi.

Thanks

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What file size and type are you set to?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by cabsurfer

I enjoy photography and have recently upgraded my sony Cybershot (8Meg) to a Canon 450D DSLR to really tap in on the creative side.

Anyway I have recently used it and am happy with some of the shots already.
But when viewing them in Photoshop I noticed the resolution of the pictures were at 72dpi.
This is fine when photos are printed at 6"X4" but anything bigger the prints will drop in detail.

I have checked the manual to see what I can do to bump the resolution up but have not been successful.

Can anyone suggest anything - I would like to get my pics up to at least 300dpi.

Thanks

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There are a couple things to keep in mind regarding this. The first thing I would ask is what recording mode are you shooting in? RAW? JPG? (small? standard? fine?) JPG+RAW?

It can become a bit tricky when thinking in terms of just DPI. You haven't made any reference to the resolution of the picture. This is what will really determine the DPI for printing.

If you take the resolution and divided that by your desired DPI you want, you will get the the maximum print size at that resolution.

For example, if you had a picture with a resolution of 1024x768 and you wanted to print at 300 DPI, your maximum effective size would be 3.41x2.56"

Now if your talking a picture with a resolution of 3888x2592 (the resolution from a RAW file on my Canon XTi/400D 10.1mp) and use the same formula at 300 dpi, you are looking at an effective print size of 12.96x8.64" at 300dpi.

So, when it down to it, you can't talk just DPI without including overall resolution. You could easily have a 300dpi picture that could only be printed at 1/3x1/3" if the overall resolution was only 100x100pixels.

By manipulating this, for example, if you wanted a 8x10" picture at 300dpi, you would need a minimum resolution of 2400x3000 (8" times 300dpi and 10" times 300dpi) Even my XTi meets that requirement, mind you would need to shoot in portrait mode rather than landscape.

It is easy to get lost in the whole DPI thing... But if you are talking DPI without resolution, you are only seeing a portion of the entire picture (pun intended).

Hope it helps.

DPI means squat, 72 DPI is the standard for DSLR Jpegs. When you open in photoshop, just select the crop tool, leave the size dimensions blank and put in '300' in the DPI, then crop and boom, you've turned it into a 300 DPI image. If you want to upscale the resolution, put in the size dimensions and 300 DPI in your cropping tool. My A700 is 12 mpix also, with a max native resolution at 14"x9" at 300DPI (4272x2848). But, I can print comfortably in the 20"x30" range by just simply upscaling my image (properly). Believe it, 12 megapixels is a TON...