Why so low kb?

[HuskerFan]

I've got my D90 set for High resolution and Large photos, but the largest they come out is around 2MB or so. I want to get some of my shots put onto canvas, but I'm afraid the lower resolution will not hold up when it gets printed so large. Why only 2MB when I have 12MP camera?

Originally Posted by HuskerFan

I've got my D90 set for High resolution and Large photos, but the largest they come out is around 2MB or so. I want to get some of my shots put onto canvas, but I'm afraid the lower resolution will not hold up when it gets printed so large. Why only 2MB when I have 12MB camera?

*ahem*

mega-BYTES and mega-PIXELS are different things.

[Jim Bryant]

Set it to RAW. You are compressing your images into jpegs.

[HuskerFan]

Very good point! I had sort of forgotten about that in my hasty writings!! Haha Thanks

[HuskerFan]

I've yet to deal with RAW, maybe now is the time to learn......

[Chip]

I could be wrong, but I think the amount of mb used to store a photo isn't related (at least directly) to resolution.

If you take a photo with, say, a lot of greens of largely the same shade, and all those greens are next to or close to each other, then the # of mbs used to store a photo will be low. But if you have a photo with lots of different colors interspersed, then the # of mbs will be much higher.

Since you're using fine and large, I believe your resolution should be fine (as long as you don't crop too much.)

If I'm off here, please correct me.

[dcclark]

Jim's advice, while usually great, is not quite right in this situation!

There are two ways you can talk about the "size" of your photos:

1. MegaPIXELS: This is the number of pixels in your image. A pixel is the smallest part of your picture, a small square of solid color. Your image may (for example) be 3000 pixels wide by 2000 pixels tall, in which case it contains a total of 3000*2000 = 6,000,000 pixels. This is also referred to as 6 megapixels, or 6 MP. No matter WHAT you do to your image, it will contain 6 megapixels -- unless you crop it, thus actually removing some of the pixels.

2. MegaBYTES. This is a measurement of how much space the image takes up on disk. Due to some extremely clever people, images are not just stored as a big list of pixels -- they can be compressed, so that we can (for example) say "this entire area is blue" -- and voila, we just stored your entire sky without having to store every single blue pixel. So, an image can be much smaller (in megaBYTES) than its corresponding dimensions (in megaPIXELS).

Exactly HOW much smaller depends on the level of compression. For example, a 10 megaPIXEL JPEG file saved at 95% quality is usually around 2 or 3 megaBYTES. On the other hand, saving the same file at 50% quality may get it to as little as 0.5 megaBYTES. The same image is there -- it's just been stored using less information (and so it may not look quite as good).

On the other hand, if you save your image in a format which does NOT compress (such as TIFF), it will be much larger in terms of data size -- because every single pixel is being stored individually. This is the gist of Jim's recommendation: if you shoot in raw format (not jpeg), then you preserve more information. But honestly, you are highly unlikely to notice until you get to be rather advanced at digital photography.

In other words: just because you have a 6 MP, 10 MP, or 15 MP camera, does NOT mean that your images will take up a corresponding amount of space on a disk. Image dimensions (pixels) are very different from image data size (megabytes).

[eNZee]

I would suggest to start shooting in RAW. the quality is the highest at that point (I think - somebody please correct me if im wrong) and you have alot more opportunity to edit your photo without hurting the image itself.
its easy to convert your raw files, you just need a program to use it. with your d90 you might have got a program called viewnx, that will help you view them. if you want to edit them i use either ps elements or lightroom. i dont know of others. in those programs you can do whatever you want to your raw photo and still preserve the quality. so in any case if you want larger files, shoot in raw.

please please someone tell me if i have this wrong.

[HuskerFan]

Excellent info and great advice! Thank you, I will start dealing with RAW files now and start learning how to use them to my advantage.

[milosh]

Originally Posted by eNZee

I would suggest to start shooting in RAW. the quality is the highest at that point (I think - somebody please correct me if im wrong) and you have alot more opportunity to edit your photo without hurting the image itself.
its easy to convert your raw files, you just need a program to use it. with your d90 you might have got a program called viewnx, that will help you view them. if you want to edit them i use either ps elements or lightroom. i dont know of others. in those programs you can do whatever you want to your raw photo and still preserve the quality. so in any case if you want larger files, shoot in raw.

please please someone tell me if i have this wrong.

You're right. And as everybody else said, image size (in MegaBytes) doesn't depend just on the image resolution, but also on compression (if you're using jpeg format) and on the amount of data that an image contains (try shooting a totally black scene and a colourfull one and you'll notice the difference). And you might try shooting in RAW since you say your images will be printed.