Is a new SLR worth it?

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#665297 1-Aug-2012 11:56

This is why people hire professionals - we create great imagery under pressure, no matter the situation or what goes wrong. I also have umbrellas for it it's wet, I scout locations in case of rain and wind, insurance, professional memberships, I have backup photographers for if I get sick (hasn't happened yet), etc.

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#665323 1-Aug-2012 12:37

timmmay:
joker97: can i ask you - if my 600D has say 18MP, if i shoot at 10MP will it give me better photos from what you're suggesting?

That depends how you manage to shoot at 10MP - sRaw/mRaw? In general your noise will reduce, but image quality will go down very slightly due to the resampling involved. In practice image quality will be about the same for a given print size, unless the print is larger than say 8x12".

In general you shoot at the native resolution of your camera, and if you resize your image you only do it once in your workflow.

can you tell me which raw is the best? i thought there was only 1 canon RAW - i shoot raw mainly for white balance adjustment but what a pain in the bum when i accidentally shoot hundreds of shots. i use adobe camera raw to process

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#665327 1-Aug-2012 12:44

RAW is RAW. sRaw and mRaw are semi-raw, cut down versions who's only advantage is they're smaller on memory cards.

I shoot everything RAW, as it gives me more latitude to process images later in ACR. Of course you process in batches, not individually, which is why I shoot M mode. I've shot around 300,000 images in the past 5 years, I still haven't shot a single image that can't be improved in ACR.

Evinta

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#665330 1-Aug-2012 12:46

Yikes. This thread became huge.

Anyways im going to agree to disagree on the ppi front, i view things differently and i'll stick to that. Anyways i decided to stick with the 1000D but also buy another body (the 600D) when i hvae the spare money, because i have been in a important situation and my camera just died without a backup, it was always the plan to have a backup SLR anyways.

I've had memory card faults, fully fledged camera breakdown, brother opening up the SLR back and expose the film situations... (i also did photography in high school but didn't use the skills for a while)

timmmay

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#665350 1-Aug-2012 13:02

You can either keep your head in the sand regarding ppi/dpi, or you can spend the five minutes it takes to educate yourself. Here are two resources.

FAQ I wrote.
Information from others.
An article from google.

Short version: the number of pixels in an image is important, but ppi and "inches" are irrelevant concepts for a digital image. It only comes into play when you want to print it, an in this case you just set it to what you want. For example my pro lab required the correct ppi (250 for them) and number of pixels, so for a 6x9" I resized to 1500 x 2250 pixels and set the ppi to 250. I could have set the ppi to 300 and the image would've looked the same, and 99% of labs would print it whatever size you told them to.

It's funny when you work with a stupid commercial printer. Send them a 60MB TIFF with the ppi set to 72 and they reject it. Change that single number (which changes nothing else) and they accept it. Sometimes they'll reject it for having too few pixels, you just do an upsize in photoshop and send it and they're happy. There's a lot of ignorance around.

There's a lot of misinformation about ppi and dpi around. I don't really mind if you continue to be ignorant of this topic, but please suggest I'm wrong, because I'm not. Ask anyone knowledgeable in the topic, but beware of so called experts who are just repeating what they heard somewhere - especially elderly ones who confused dpi and ppi, which are completely different.

Chainsaw

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#665535 1-Aug-2012 16:06

Timmay's right re dpi. You can take your 3000x2000 pixel image into Photoshop, change it's dpi setting, save it, and you still have a 3000x2000 pixel image. All that's changed is the little field within the computer file (the jpg or whatever) that noted down the dpi.

timmmay

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#665568 1-Aug-2012 16:58

I've attached the same image at 5ppi and 5000ppi to this post. You can verify that using Photoshop or Irfanview, assuming Geekzone doesn't strip off exif. They look the same right? The only time they should look different is if you send them unmodified to a printer without specifying the print size.

5ppi

500ppi

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richms

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#665571 1-Aug-2012 17:03

IME it only changes the default size the image is when you drag and drop it into indesign, if its 72 ppi then the image drops as massive and I have to resize it down, if its 300 or 600 then it drops smaller and I can drag it bigger.

Richard rich.ms

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#665823 2-Aug-2012 00:32

Evinta:
Well one of the problems with the 1000D is that it doesn't seem to shoot at 300ppi which i need for printing, unless there is a work around.

you can't shoot anything at any ppi because ppi refers to total pixels divided by paper size.
what you shoot is total pixels.
what you print is paper size.

ppi refers to what you shoot divided by where you print onto.

your camera does not have a crystal ball to know what you will be printing onto.
your camera cannot shoot at any ppi, nor can anyone's camera, unless it can also predict the future.

timmmay

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#665845 2-Aug-2012 07:33

To be fair, cameras do embed a ppi value into the image metadata, but as we've said the number is made up and irrelevant. The camera makers should set it to 300, just to placate the less well informed.

Jaxson

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#665860 2-Aug-2012 08:13

timmmay: I've attached the same image at 5ppi and 5000ppi to this post...

They look the same right?

Actually the 5000ppi looks substantially better to me:

timmmay

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#665864 2-Aug-2012 08:19

Jaxson:
timmmay: I've attached the same image at 5ppi and 5000ppi to this post...

They look the same right?

Actually the 5000ppi looks substantially better to me:

That's interesting. They look identical on my PC at home and my PC at work, Firefox and Chrome. What browser are you using?

Chainsaw

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#666113 2-Aug-2012 12:41

Um.... Joke maybe?
Looks like I might haver to change my avatar!

timmmay

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#666114 2-Aug-2012 12:41

Haha, I didn't really look at your image :)

Jaxson

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#666144 2-Aug-2012 13:05

Glad you spotted it eventually. I wasn't going to ruin the surprise.

What I did find funny though was a printing firm rejecting your image as not having enough detail, with no regards to the actual resolution/pixel count of the image you were submitting.

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