Throughout most of my life many people I have come in contact with seem to use various words when it comes to the size or display resolution of an image. We are not talking about the size stored on your drive or camera, but more about the display size. It is easy to understand when there are so many different words to describe similar things. This basic resolution information should help make it a little more clear and easy to understand if you are a complete novice or beginner with images and resolution. I have been working with image resolution though my profession for years on the web and in print so these are just words and an understanding most other people have used with me.
Photos should be taken in the best display resolution available. You can always make the resolution smaller but you can’t capture the exact photo again in a higher resolution. The reason why a photo should be sized correctly is so people can see it or load it quickly. A web photo on Facebook would be sized smaller than a poster image. As an example photos on the web should normally be smaller than images sized for printed posters.
Think of everything in sensors. Sensors capture the image and the image is converted into pixels. The more pixels in the image the higher the resolution. This image originally had dimensions of: 1752 × 2302 sensors but you are most likely seeing it live on the web in 233 x 300 pixels so it loads fast and does not take up the entire browser window.
Paris Tower Resolution Example
Example resolutions in your daily life:
- 300 x 600 IMU – (Half Page Ad) This is an IAB standard size for the Web
- 1280 x 1024 The resolution on some computer screens.
- 2700×1800 Minimum “DPI suggested from Snapfish” for a printed 20″ x 30″ poster.
- 6120 × 4500 IMAX actually discernible pixels.
Megapixel or MP (1 million pixels) is just a number created by multiplying these two numbers. So 20000 x 15000 would be 300000000 or “300 Megapixels.” If an image was taken in 300 MP then it must have 300000000 pixels in the image.
When printing an image DPI is just “dots per square inch” which could be understood as pixels per square inch or the resolution used on the page.
When a photographer or videographer takes images or video of your event, product, or person be sure to receive the best resolution available or hopefully the resolution it was taken in so that you can make crisp large prints. Images can always be made smaller so that you can email them or upload them for your friends but you can never make them larger in the same great resolution.
To see the resolution on most computers just look at the general file properties of the image. Average windows users can right click on the file, go to properties, and see the resolution. Please let me know if this helps or if you have any other questions about the resolution or size of an image.
Special thanks to WSR Creative’s Jose Delgado for his help with some great resolution video work this last year.