Resolution

What is resolution? No, not the kind you make on New Year’s Day. The kind that affect your pictures. Well each image you take with a digital camera is made up of pixels. The number of pixels you have along the width and height of your picture is what is being referred to when someone talks about the resolution of the image. Pretty cool, huh?

So the smaller the resolution, the fewer the number of pixels. The higher the resolution of the image, the bigger the file. Now the reason this matters in photography is the bigger the file the more disk space you are going to use when you save the image to your computer (from your camera). This can eat up disk space until you do whatever you are planning on to it and then remove it from your computer. I do recommend removing it eventually, by the way, otherwise you’ll end up with a computer that is only a very expensive photo album. When you do get around to removing the image, make sure you defragment your hard drive to clean up the space for your next set of photographs. A fragmented drive just slows everything down.

If you are just going to be using the images on the computer, the resolution really doesn’t need to be more than 640×480. However, if you want quality prints you should aim for 1800×1200 or higher depending on the size of the print you want.

Photo Credit Dull Hunk

June 15th, 2009 by birdievogel | Posted in Large Files | (0)