23 years of doing architectural renderings, every now and then a client wants to print a billboard and asks for a 600 ppi image, even when I explain that you need less than 100 most think I am talking sci fi. This video is now in my arsenal to send to these clients. Thank you for making it.
You're forgetting those billboards are installed on-site where viewing distance can be two feet from the billboard (pedestrians on the sidewalk or potential buyers in a demo house - both of which are wall installations). Poor resolution reflects on the company. Can you trust a company that can't print a poster to build your apartment or house?
50mpx for a cover sounds fair. Hell, if a 1000mpx are available, give me that. Final artist doesn't care about initial artist's feelings on the matter. I might only decide to use the ribbon on the dress from that full body shot. Your 10mpx aren't going to cut it. When I purchase a graphic asset, I might use that same image for a dozen more reasons, or on various media. 50mpx is not at all much to ask for from a "professional". In these days where large 4k screens that are hanging on store walls to advertise an item are becoming the norm, can you really say your 2mpx DSLR will do the job? Go ahead, do that equation. How many ppi are needed in the original full subject plus background to zoom into just an eye that will be viewed at half a meter for a magazine cover. Then also displayed on 4k+ monitors 3 meters tall?
Fantastic, you explained this so well, not many people know this. My friend uses his Phase one 80MP for full page magazine ads and usually uses his Canon Mark V for the billboards, opposite of what everyone expects.
@@robbie154 Overkill as a final resolution for the magazine, sure. Having lots of resolution is still useful with editing and retouching, etc and in the commercial world there's no such thing as too much resolution for working files. To a point anyway 😁
So many photographers big on social sites have been saying it's not about the gear but then start bragging about their latest gear. This is the first and most compelling video of why the creativity, composition, content, and craft matter so much more. Absolutely BRILLIANT vlog and so insightful. Thank you.
I've been saying this for years. I remember the first billboard I had go up with a digital camera was the Canon 10D which was a 6.3 MP camera and that advertisement was glorious!
I've made a 3 by 6 meters billboard with old Nikon D70 (6Mp) about 10 years ago. It was re-printed 3 years ago only because of the colors became not that bright. Otherwise it is still there))
Agreed, I have an old Nikon d40, I think it’s right around 5mp and the pictures it takes are still better than lots of inexpensive cameras with 3-4 times the MP. It’s certainly not professional gear, nor am I a professional photographer but I’m sure a skilled photographer could take nice shots with it with a nice lens and the average joe would have no idea it’s an old 5mp camera.
Most billboard designs I have done are in 72 or 96dpi, as 300dpi often result in gigantic files the printing company can't handle, often they still have a very old computer with old version of windows or mac running the printers. As for posters could do int 150dpi or 300dpi, but have to say I won a poster award with grabbing frames from the movie which is in 1080p (close to 2mp) and enable to still get enough resolutions from it. Honestly have not seen a real situation yet where 100mp is really required, unless specific plan to timelapse with zooming into sections of the shot to follow moving subjects.
High MP is not for billboards, it’s for large format prints seen up close, in galleries, on large posters (bus stops for instance), and other OOH placements that put you within 10 ft. Billboards, the ones you see on highways barely have a resolution of 50dpi, because you’re seeing them from hundreds of feet away.
Sterling Sanders it is PPI, not DPI. you missed the difference explained in the video. The percentage of photographers having their work shown as you described is quite small.
Samtagri No. My comment was specifically talking about what Out of Home (OOH) printers set for large scale prints, 45-60 DPI on average. I'm discussing DPI because it does have an effect on the print output. While DPI is primarily the printers domain, they will discuss with you viewing location and distance because a higher DPI produces better image tonality and smoother color blending, but also costs more because it uses more ink. PPI alone is not a determination of quality or clarity, it is a determination of resolution scale, that scale mixed the actual resolution (MP) of your photo, the viewing distance and the DPI of the print together are what determines quality and clarity. As for the "small percentage," you speak of, every Advertising Art Director I know has dealt with this, photographers and designers alike. If you live in a city, you see many large scale up close images on a regular basis, all of those were photographed, designed and printed by people. There are hundreds of thousands of people worldwide that work this on a regular basis.
Its not true. High MP is there for having real estate. With High MP you can crop without loosing much of resolution because you have so much. This makes it much easier to fix stuff. Also you do see high MP on High Resolution Displays
I used to work for Tanger Outlets, we did all our billboards at 100dpi. That said, we would also do slate board style walkup ads in the centers, usually on plinths or in POPs. Those things needed to be 300dpi, and the resolution needed to be huge. I'm talking about upscaling an 18mp image four times. With final filesizes on the order of gigabytes.
Finally somebody says it. I'm a graphic designer over 7 years and got into photography 2 years ago and I've seen the size of some of the images we've used in the past at work to produce billboards with. One company quoted us to only needing an image at 150dpi. I have to say I rarely ever hear the term ppi, as when dealing with printers, they're only concerned with dpi. Great video as always lads! This also added to my reasoning of switching from Canon 6D to Fuji XT2, no regrets on that switch, loving the Fuji system.
I do Prepress for large format printing and we use a minimum of 100dpi, not only because of the viewing factor but also try telling a printer to RIP a 30ft banner at 300 dpi, it might not even render.
9 Years ago I took a photo class with 6 other photographers. I had a simple Rebel XTi, the others had high resolution monsters with lots of L glass (or the Nikon equivalent). About half way through the teacher talked about shooting models for billboards on a 2MP camera and still seeing the images today (in 2009) on billboards. For the next 20 minutes he talked about how MP don't matter....he made these other photographers really uncomfortable. As a newbie to digital, it was glorious! haha
The geg is, that sensor resolution is relatively cheap, while lens reach is bloody heavy and expensive. Anybody doing reach photography or macro photography gains from higher resolution sensor, because you have to crop a lot. Then You might end up with those 2-4Mpx...
Orrrrr… You can just buy old “enlarger lens”, for 5-150$, since in macro you don’t actually need auto focusing. And any “Industar-52” for two bucks can squeeze the shit out of most modern sensors. ^^
Resolution can make all the difference. The final work can be low-res but you will need that extra resolution for layout, cropping , etc. any modification/transformation you do, megapixel matters.
Most standard format billboards start life as a 10 or so Inch wide art board in illustrator. I know this because I am a graphic designer and I make billboards for archaic dinosaur clients from time to time.
@@agro0 While I prefer to get the composition spot on, as cropping wastes some of my camera's capability, there are times I have no choice but to crop. Shooting wide on my compact, for example, produces very soft corners (as the lens doesn't cover the entire sensor at it's widest), so I crop to sidestep this side effect. For "Macro" shooting, I've little choice but to crop in as I lose a lot of minimum focus distance when zoomed in.
My favorite prints and images for that matter were shot on a Nikon D70 ( 6 mp ) , i now have a D750 and yes I love the bells and whistles but dont get caught up in all that malarky. Get out there and start taking pics!
Love it ... dispelling the myths. I have met so many photographers that insist they must use the most expensive of everything and the highest resolution of everything. I always knew that was actually a cover for lack of skill or the fear of the lack of skill.
Dante Velasquez hehe give me cheap equipment and expensive equipment an I will produce good stuff with both, but I now for larger print you will prefer the more expensive. But the lens, light and skills is the most important!
I shoot with a D3 and D800e. After watching this video my D3 just gained a few more years of life. My D800e maybe another decade. But yes it's nice to have that extra resolution when you really need it. Great video!!!
A great description. The only reason I can see for high-megapixel cameras is for cropping. Simply put, if for whatever reason one was not able to fully utilize the entire frame for a shot, a high-megapixel camera will still provide plenty of resolution for just that. For everything else... such a high MP count is ridiculous, but memory and storage manufacturers love them!
I have been in the sign and grand format printing industry for 20 years and have been trying to explain this to potential customers for at least that long. Nice Job!
I just printed a 10 feet by 6 feet photo for an exhibition, using a "cheapo" APS-C Fuji X-T20 with 24 Mpix, and I can say, the results look jaw dropping, even when I examine the details from 1 feet. (Yes I was using that incredible 56mm 1.2 lens at f5.6 when I took the photo for maximum sharpness, but it's a different story)
Trufully, sensors use three photosites to make up pixel data value that build up an image. Your computer screen even displays R,G,B diode colors to build a pixel data value projection. Surely your client wants what your client wants. Then there is discussion about texture, your eye at distance may not be able to resolve details at a given limit, but the ability to discern texture in those pixels extends beyond resolution. I can’t resolve the blades of grass looking at a still shot of the video post, but the blades of real grass compared to the posture do reveal texture. Even your jeans that you ware at distance to my view reveal a quality different then the plastic poster material, neither of which can I resolve with the eye. There is something to be said about large photosites compared to small ones with regards to noise and color depth. 🙏
In galleries I always peek up close, not just with photographs, but with paintings. I love looking at something like a Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud painting and looking at the brushwork. One of the reasons I also shoot with film is is the visual texture of the grain in certain film stocks some simply see this as an undesirable flaw, I don't at all. I love the clarity of higher end digital prints and think they're amazing, but I love silver gelatin and ilfochrome done traditionally as equally if not more. These are not techniques and practices that should not be lost and I dislike the attitude that *sometimes* comes along with early adopters that newer is automatically better. I love new tech and more megapixels, but throwing certain things under the bus is a grave mistake. There's 35mm stock out there you theoretically can blow up to nearly 3.5 meters wide and not see any "horrible" grain (ADOX CMS 20). Though no low light for that stuff. P.s before anyone says you can imitate film in digital post, you can't. When I see a 'pushed' or 'pulled' image done with a preset say in VSCO all it looks like they've done is alter the contrast and saturation to get an approximation. Why would I take one medium, say like a water colour, scan it and then make it look like an oil painting in Photoshop filter because I changed my mind or something. Plus, it's cheap.
Absolutely love my film, I don't do enough of it or enough traditional printing with digital negatives. Got to say I love knowing a thing about printers, people go crazy over a pixel, but if you tell the printer to spread the dots out it gives a similar effect as film grain. People seem to accept it better because its a dot instead of a square. Still, there's nothing like silver.
High resolutions are not so much for the final products unless having the ability to crop really maters to you. Higher resolutions are important when doing image post processing as they provide much more data to those processes and helps with different corrections.
For all our website and graphic design photography we still use a trusty old Canon 30D - and we STILL need to compress the files sometimes. Takes amazing pictures and they are £50 in mint used condition.
I learned this when i had the privilege to talk to Ralph McQuarrie about his matte paintings that he made for the Star Wars movies. I asked how he could make those paintings so live like and sharp on such a huge screen like used in Imax theaters. The answer was similar, if it looks sharp at 2-3ft it will look just as sharp on a huge screen with the appropriate distance. With matte paintings light is very important and painting those highlights are made easier by this effect as your eyes and brain will add details where there is none. I have noticed with cameras that are older and have lower resolution that they are able to catch more light as the individual 'pixels' that catch the light are much larger. More resolution is not always an advantage and lower resolutions can be used effectively in certain scenarios.
I work at Daktronics in South Dakota. We manufacture displays for all sorts of venues from large advertisements to the largest NFL display (Atlanta Falcons Halo Display). The Falcons display pixel is 3 LEDs in RGB at approximately 1cm apart. From the stands the display looks like it is in HD. You should take a tour of the Brookings SD plant if you get a chance.
This is why I just purchased a D3 having already D700, D300s and D200 :D Thanks for confirming this guys. Less MP > less disk space > less backup space > faster sharing > All good in my book. Cheers!
I remember in my dad's business, when I was a kid in the 70s, the company would receive billboard materials for products the we sold. The dots were like an inch of so in diameter and quite a lot of white space around. When standing way back the dots would converge.
When I ran the FujiFilm Mini Lab at work, we printed about 350 DPI. We did this so it was just a little better than needed for the eye. It worked out about 2.8mp for a 6x4 image.
Reminds me of those video screens from those musicians these days. If you see them up close it's just some green, blue and red dots. But from far away you actually see your idol performing. So, even there you don't need like 800kp resolution. (Which there are probably no cameras capable of anyway)
Nice to have this resolution issue spelled out. Years ago I took a picture with my 6 MP camera and printed a 20 inch x 30 inch picture that I framed and hung in our house. The resolution looks great at the distance we view it from. Thanks for doing the math on this.
Very well explained. There are certainly some reasons for high resolution but i agree, in most cases its not needed. As a relativly poor and unexperienced photographer like me, its nice to be able to crop afterwards.
OutOfCuriosity well, as a photographer who shot on 24mp for six or so years I can say that 24mp is plenty for cropping. I shoot lots of events where one sometimes doesn't have time to change lenses and its nice to be able to crop, but I almost never crop more than 2x and that would still give me 6mp, which is still plenty for doing prints and web-based stuff, just no posters, but when I shoot posters I mostly have enough time to set up my shot so I don't need to crop. I will probably keep shooting on 24mp for the next six years to come because it's just the perfect balance between resolution and file-size.
Also should be noted that the advances in printer technologies are allowing for larger and larger prints while getting the same image quality. Combine that with the huge megapixel count of some dslr's and the limits are only paper size...
Using PPI on display is confusing, especially with retina display which use pixel doubling. There is however a nice feature where you can preview real print dimenions on screen. Set the screen resolution under general settings. In order to get the correct number, divide your display resolution by the width of the display in inch
Good one. And it goes even further when it comes to things like pixel shift technology (e.g. from Pentax, Sony and Olympus). With a Pentax K-1, you already have 36MP without an AA-filter. Pixel shift takes 4 exposures so you have to be on a tripod and if there's any movement in the image, you're going to have to process it with Pentax's own software. Taking images this way just seems a very nerdy thing to do. But they might sell more cameras this way.
My general rule of thumb is to acquire at least 4x the resolution of the required output resolution. So, for 2-3MP output (which covers 90%+ of uses) acquire at 8-12MP. This accounts for the fact that modern bayer array cameras aren't capturing full RGB at the sensor resolution. My general practice is to take the raw capture and reduce by 50% for retouching, then reduce by 50% again for digital delivery, so for a modern camera (like The EOS R5), raw capture is 8192x5462 into Adobe LR, do basic exposure, WB, Contrast, Saturation, from there export a 16 bit TIFF at 4096x2730 for retouching in PS, then from there, deliver a maximum of 2048x1366, rarely deliver the 4096x2730 image. Full HD resolution looks fine at pretty much every print size, and on pretty much every display, especially when it's super sharp because it was originally acquired at a much higher resolution. You don't need 45+MP to capture at though. As long as you're capturing at least 8-12MP, Full HD output resolution is totally fine.
The video and many of the comments are only discussing one reason for high resolution (print size) and if looked at objectively, one can find several reasons for wanting more pixels than absolutely necessary. Here just two reasons I like high resolution images: if my composition is less than perfect I can freely crop half of my photo away and still have good resolution for large prints and what about zooming in on a photo (different kind of crop) such as a shot of the moon or a small bird photo.
Bang ON! -, endless HD filling up with gigs of oversized photos. Even phone cameras are oversized in megapixels. Great photo taking, good glass and less compression are more important. Most of the pix displayed are screen res and that is around 1 MB. Save your money.
I photograph artwork for small museums and galleries. In this case resolution is important so people can study the fine details of a work and god forbid something happen to an original there is as good as possible of a backup digital copy. And thats all of course in uncompressed raw. I also photograph live bands. For that 24 megapixels is plenty. For that stuff i usually do raw+12MP jpegs on a mix of apsc and full frame
Great video, great message!!! Resolution is probably the single most overrated parameter in modern cameras. My lower end camera, a 4yo Fuji X camera, has 16MP. Way enough...
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Great point for billboards. Personally I like to get closer to poster-size pictures. Then I could see the pixels.
Absolutely! I'm getting tired of constantly hearing "You don't *Need* that resolution unless you're printing BILLBOARDS!" etc. Usually in response to them not wanting to buy a medium format camera or judging you for wanting to spend your money. Everybody's so quick to tell you what you don't *Need* as if pixels are the only benefits, forgetting the massive dynamic range improvements, recoverable shadow details, increased tonal range, smoother gradients, less false color, increased sensor sharpness, fewer lens flaws, less noise, more detail, etc. Feel free to stay ignorant, people. Just don't tell me what I should do with *MY* money.
That's the reason why its easier, and faster work flow with less strain on my laptop nef files from my D700 than D800. Thank you Lee for sharing this; a validation of practical megapixel requirement.
The old school print megapxl wars (and I neeed it for billboard argument) were over 10years ago. The new megapxl war is about use in digital multi-media, downloads, big screens, zooming & cropping, 4k photo/video, etc.... Who buys a $4000 camera in 2018 only for print work? Hey, but I love you guys and this is really good to know.
It's the difference between creative photography and digital data gathering. Creative photography demands no great fidelity, but lots of ingenuity. Digital data gathering is a technical exercise in which the viewer enlarges an image 400%, looks into the corners and declares the photograph inadequate. It's an interesting exercise but has nothing to do with an emotional response to an image. Which is what photography is all about.
Borderlands The statement "what photography is all about" is totally subjective. We are over 20 years into the digital era. Love it, leave it, or get left. Keep living in "the good old days" and see where that get you.
Yes, photography is totally subjective. The exceptions are surveillance, medical, astronomy, and similar technical media. A 4k monitor is 8mp. A 24 mp sensor covers any current commercial format. Most photographers are not professional (let's say fewer than 1% of people reading this), and of those professionals very few exhaust the capacity of a 50mp camera and even fewer have the lenses to resolve it. So to conclude, almost nobody reading this needs the resolution of a current professional digital camera, and none require one to pursue photography as a creative medium.
Usually, it's ideal to work with an image twice the resolution the final product needs to be. If you add text, put multiple pictures together and so on, when you scale it down it'll look sharper.
A little late to the party but this is so true. I have blown out 8mp pictures from my samsung phone to a1 size canvas and they look stunning AF. I really don't know why pixel peepers go off their gun about having the latest biggest sensor available. Thanks for this video.
yep i worked on ads and you can pretty much use a 1024x768 image to print anything you want, unless your client is like high-end, in which case they'll know to provide decent pictures in the first place. of course you better treat the image a bit, but the source material doesn't need to be super high res. heck some people would send me tiny 640x480 shots and i'd make it work with interpolation and filters. sure, it was NEVER ideal and only gave me more work, but my point is... well i've already stated it, lol.
Tbh I've never known a pro photographer claim they need high megapixels for billboards, advertising in general yes, because there's plenty of big adverts that are at ground level, those are the ones that require 50MP+ as people can go and stand right in front of them. At the end of the day a photographer doesn't think about whether they need high megapixel count or not when buying a camera, they just tally that into the many things to think about when comparing potential products. As you already said, the main advantage to higher MP is the ability to crop the image in more in post which is a very common thing to do, so they're probably not really thinking about how big they can blow the image up, they, like the rest of the world, just counts it as an advantage if the camera they're interested in has a higher MP count than another camera.
It all depends on what you want to do. I printed a 500 MP panorama 4m x 1m (around 280 ppi). Why I needed that resolution? I wanted the spectator to be able to discover all the little details of that beautiful skyline and get really close to it.
Two things not mentioned in this video: Down sampling a high MP images end in better quality than taking the same picture with lower MP camera; and the diversity of executions you have with a high MP image are much more considerable. As someone who works in advertising, the usage options for using a singular execution in a wide variety of contexts (near-field OOH, far-field OOH, various digital context) is much more important. There has never been a time when I've received a file as thought, "oh no, the resolution is to high," but I have thought the reverse. The more resolution the better imo. As a photographer higher MP is worth it for the cropping ability-while maintaining visual quality-alone.
Great explanation of PPI and DPI and overall great video! However the opening statement of "Most professional DSLR's are over 50 Mega pixels" just isn't true. The Canon 5DS and 5DS R barely reach over that at 50.6MP. Anything over 50 starts getting into medium format.
Please tell me that before you threw away the billboard you measured the actual pixels? As you scooted down the #4 with your finger it looked like maybe 4-5PPI? That way you can compare the viewing distance numbers with how it was actually printed. I have seen other people make the argument about viewing distance, but bravo for actually getting that print, well played.
You do need something much larger for giant art prints that are viewed much closer. Apple Stores use giant high resolution images for the art along the sides of the store.
I rented a Canon 5D Mark III, 6 years ago to do a billboard. It came out AMAZING. I thought, at the time, that it wouldn't be enough PPI/DPI. I agree with the conclusion here, because since then I've learned more about how light and depth and angle drop off. The human's eye and perception is good, but it's not AMAZING.
I’ve been saying this forever. I always bring up the fact that people were printing billboards with the 5D classic 13years ago. And even on older cameras back when digital went full frame and everyone was stoked.
Hexium Please enlighten me. Which typical proffesional DSLR's has +50MP :)? I currently own both the Sony A7RIII (42.4MP) and the Canon 1DX MK 2 (20.2MP). And I would catergorize these models as pretty proffesional DSLR's. What did I miss?
When I started as a digital tech we were using 6mp digital backs for billboards and no one seemed to care. The biggest excuse I've heard for buying a 100mp back is that you could shoot a full length shot and crop out a portrait if your client needed it.
This same principle applies to tvs. The average living room setup places the tv far enough from the sofa that 1080 HD is as much as you need on a 50-60 inch screen. 4K on the same size screen doesn't make a difference unless you sit within 6 feet of the TV. At the store you stand that close, the TV dazzles you, and you pay hundreds more for a feature that doesn't actually make a difference.
This is a limited experiment because it looks at only one aspect of a photograph. It also makes an error in looking at the graphics while discussing the photograph. The number 4 is produced in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop and its resolution is independent from the photograph. Secondly, while a high quality lens can produce high sharpness in a low resolution photograph, usually low resolution sensors are paired with lower quality lenses and good sharpness is absent in that case. Thirdly, an image contains much more than edge sharpness. Higher Mp images produce more detail between the sharp edges and this extra detail is visibly absent from lower Mp images even at larger distances. Fourth, the same image reproduced on a billboard will be printed in many media from online to art magazines, each with various resolution requirements. Fifth, long before the image is on the billboard it must be sold to the client and he or she will be looking at prints up close and more Mp do make a difference at that point. Sixth, the graphic designer wants high resolution delivered so he/she can crop etc as much as they want - try telling a graphic designer that 2Mp is enough and you will be laughed off the job. Seventh, while digital sensors have excellent edge sharpness at lower Mp levels, and is superior to film, digital color resolution is not as good and only matches film at the 20Mp+ mark. In theory 2 Mp are enough, but in practice, about 18/20Mp or more is the current resolution suitable for most professional jobs for quality results.
I am not a phtographer but i find the extra pixels helpful when editing, like scaling and such. Also you can zoom in after you've taken the photo and so on. Its just more to work with. Same reason why you don't record a song with a 320 bitrate even though you upload it in that form.
Great video. I'm doing a bit of research because I'm about to shoot a billboard. Looks like my 5D mark iv is more than up for the task. Thanks for this quality information. I've taken a couple of courses from Fstoppers and thus far education is my best return on investment, far better than any piece of gear.
Megapixels are really only a factor in cropping a photo. It is nice to be able to crop and blow up one section of a photo and still have it be sharp, even though it may only be 1/10th of the original size. That way you can essentially replace longer focal length lenses without losing much Quality. If you're not cropping then even a lowly 3 Megapixel camera can be enough for most applications.
well, there are another reason tho.. mostly we need that higher pixel count for other use like super sampling, as we know, we almost never take a perfect shot to begin with, unless in highly controlled studio enverioment. so we use these extra pixel to produce good end result. i agree 2mp is mostly what we need, but for these perfect 2 mp, i like 18 mp camera so much that it combine 9 pixel to 1 to produce perfect 2 mp image.
One word. Astrophotography. You want more pixels so you can get higher resolution images of extremely faint and distant objects. If your sensor has more pixels, you can crop deeper after the fact and will be able to pull a lot more information from your image. That’s why I’m able to get a recognizable image of Bode’s galaxy with a 50mm f1.8 lens and an APS-C sensor camera body. Also the cigar galaxy in the same shot.
Very nice topic well executed. But I think there still will be a noticeable difference in end result (viewing distance) between 2 mega pixel camera shots printed in 2 mega pixel and a high pixel camera shots downscaled to 2 mega pixel print as higher quality camera captures more details. Similar example with 4k video downscaled to 1080p. Great video nonetheless!
I don’t agree that “professional” cameras are 50MP. There are lots of pro cameras less than 50MP. File Size is another pit fall to 50MP+. But... tack sharp images are nice. Great video guys!
Thanks to lossless compression algorithms, those 50MP images shouldn't be nearly as big as you think they'll be. Largest CR3 file I've seen from my M50 was like 40 megabytes, where uncompressed would be around 126 megabytes ((24*14*3)/8)
You‘re totally right (of course). But sadly i see many wall prints and 3m x 2m printed nature shots where you easily get as close as 0,5m and its horryble because they would need the 50mpx hassleblad but they are almost never sharp enough
Very interesting, i guess for photographers like me, to get a good quality print for an exhibit, at home or an exhibition, a 300dpi is essential, as have seen people getting too close to big prints and admiring or criticizing the details, be it a landscape or a macro
Depends, I'll happily drop down to 200ppi for my prints. More often I'll tell the printer to spread the dots apart if I need to go bigger because it gives a better result. People will go crazy if they think they recognize a pixel in the image, but don't bat an eye at seeing a cluster of dots. It also encourages people to get their noses off my prints X)
I had great fun back in the early 1970s producing massive prints for the Forestry Commission display at the Melbourne Show. By massive, I mean the photo was split into sections six feet high (the width of the Ilford photo paper rolls) and exposed by projecting the image onto the paper taped to the darkroom walls, then developed with buckets of developer and kitchen squeegee mops on the floor (we had a floor drain in the specially designed darkroom at HQ). It took many sections to produce the final displays. Even better, we were using large format glass negatives from the late 19th century. Mostly 5 x 4 but also some 10 x 8 negs. People would stand about six feet away or more to see the detail of those early railway and forestry scenes in colonial Australia. Even though the lenses back then were at best Cooke triplets, the results nearly a century later were very impressive. You may not need 50 megapixels, or even the 500 megapixels or more that large format film can offer, but if you have it, it's awesome. So no apologies for owning a Nikon D850 today or having a trunk full of medium and large to very large format negs from my film days, when I almost never used 35mm. I probably crop most of my images now as then, as composition and afterthought dictates, especially for wildlife; having that high megapixel sensor is no different than when I was shooting all day with 5 x 4 film and revelled in the detail it offered. Just look closely at all these wonderful old large format shots at Shorpy to see what I mean. www.shorpy.com/
In Austria Most of the ads are on walls right beside the streets because in the city there are a lot of bus stops where you stand and wath your surroundings.
The video would be more convincing if we would focus on a portrait and no in a number which would probably be inserted digitally into the big board. I have seen some commercial applications where resolution is a must. But it is true, no everybody needs tons of megapixels, those cameras are for very specific applications only.
High end product shots need the resolution for post cropping for different distributions. Those in the know don't say billboards b3cause they know better.
As much as I agree with this video as well as the article, there is no mention of the actual dpi and ppi of the billboard in the video! Given your calculations of 4ppi, it is clearly visible in the video, that this billboard is printed at a much higher resolution. I am really interested to find out what ACTUAL billboards resolution are in addition to the calculations. (It may be that this billboard was printed much higher than necessary, but would be good to know.)
Well, printing at high DPI doesn't ad much to the cost, so why not (although it doesn't do anything). The PPI of the billboard were also higher in the billboard shown in the video, simply because the camera's relosution allowed it. But the point he's trying to make is that you could have went down even further to 4ppi and it would have been fine.
That billboard was printed from a 24.5”w x 7.5”h, 300dpi, CMYK file (without bleed, 15.12 MP). The artwork is a composite of several images, and the photo of the girl in the adirondack chair was taken with an iPhone. Layered photoshop files usually get sent to the billboard printer, so vector text prints a little cleaner than the raster layers, and the printed vinyl ends up being about 12.5 ppi (before any upsampling is done in the print software). I share an office with the creative team, AMA.
Thanks for that. I've said for years that MP count is marketing. I shoot nothing higher than 12MP (D700, D300s, Lumix LX100); I'd go to 16 or 20 if Nikon came out with a true D700 replacement but as much as anything it would be for the improved DR and low light performance that a newer sensor would give. As you highlight and I like to say, no-one ever looked at a good photograph from usual viewing distance then got in really close and said it would have been improved for higher resolution. In any case I spend most of the time shooting film these days. What's that - 16MP at best? Later this year I'm going on a three-week photo tour with a couple of NIkon F3s and my old ME Super. On the list of things that make a great image, resolution is somewhere near the bottom.
I got it and was well explained as usual, but still love that insane resolution of my 5dsr. You can crop an image at 50% and still use that area for working for whatever you need. At least I use that excuse. :)
I use a Sony a7s for stills only. 12 megapixel only yet I print poster size without discernible loss of image quality (and that’s not taking correct viewing distance into account). This “crop sensor medium format” camera’s image quality more than compensates for the smaller file size. Sharpness and resolution are overrated but that’s clever marketing at work. If I do require a larger file I use a tele lens and stitch.
23 years of doing architectural renderings, every now and then a client wants to print a billboard and asks for a 600 ppi image, even when I explain that you need less than 100 most think I am talking sci fi. This video is now in my arsenal to send to these clients. Thank you for making it.
Exactly!
ME TOO!!! LOL
Jaw dropping!!! I believe you 100%
You're forgetting those billboards are installed on-site where viewing distance can be two feet from the billboard (pedestrians on the sidewalk or potential buyers in a demo house - both of which are wall installations). Poor resolution reflects on the company. Can you trust a company that can't print a poster to build your apartment or house?
50mpx for a cover sounds fair. Hell, if a 1000mpx are available, give me that.
Final artist doesn't care about initial artist's feelings on the matter. I might only decide to use the ribbon on the dress from that full body shot. Your 10mpx aren't going to cut it.
When I purchase a graphic asset, I might use that same image for a dozen more reasons, or on various media. 50mpx is not at all much to ask for from a "professional".
In these days where large 4k screens that are hanging on store walls to advertise an item are becoming the norm, can you really say your 2mpx DSLR will do the job?
Go ahead, do that equation. How many ppi are needed in the original full subject plus background to zoom into just an eye that will be viewed at half a meter for a magazine cover. Then also displayed on 4k+ monitors 3 meters tall?
Fantastic, you explained this so well, not many people know this. My friend uses his Phase one 80MP for full page magazine ads and usually uses his Canon Mark V for the billboards, opposite of what everyone expects.
That 80mp is still overkill for a magazine size. Like way overkill
@@robbie154 Overkill as a final resolution for the magazine, sure. Having lots of resolution is still useful with editing and retouching, etc and in the commercial world there's no such thing as too much resolution for working files. To a point anyway 😁
So many photographers big on social sites have been saying it's not about the gear but then start bragging about their latest gear. This is the first and most compelling video of why the creativity, composition, content, and craft matter so much more. Absolutely BRILLIANT vlog and so insightful. Thank you.
I've been saying this for years. I remember the first billboard I had go up with a digital camera was the Canon 10D which was a 6.3 MP camera and that advertisement was glorious!
MDR Foto do you still have your 10D? I do :)
I've made a 3 by 6 meters billboard with old Nikon D70 (6Mp) about 10 years ago. It was re-printed 3 years ago only because of the colors became not that bright. Otherwise it is still there))
I took a picture of my asshole with an old kick-start oil mirror dioscilator, about 2mb
I wish I still had the 10D , butit died a few years ago. It was a fantastic camera
Agreed, I have an old Nikon d40, I think it’s right around 5mp and the pictures it takes are still better than lots of inexpensive cameras with 3-4 times the MP. It’s certainly not professional gear, nor am I a professional photographer but I’m sure a skilled photographer could take nice shots with it with a nice lens and the average joe would have no idea it’s an old 5mp camera.
Most billboard designs I have done are in 72 or 96dpi, as 300dpi often result in gigantic files the printing company can't handle, often they still have a very old computer with old version of windows or mac running the printers. As for posters could do int 150dpi or 300dpi, but have to say I won a poster award with grabbing frames from the movie which is in 1080p
(close to 2mp) and enable to still get enough resolutions from it. Honestly have not seen a real situation yet where 100mp is really required, unless specific plan to timelapse with zooming into sections of the shot to follow moving subjects.
I'm curious electronic billboards obviously have use lights to create thier images. What is the average resolution of electronic billboards?
@@SchardtCinematic Many large ones are fairly low res. The "dots"/lights are large and not very close. Which is fine if the viewer is 500+ feet away.
Hmm, I disagree, it's still a valid excuse until my wife watches this video
LOL. This made me chuckle!
5 years ago before I was married, I thought wife jokes are hilarious. It has now become very real
Good answer adventure Lol
lol
Need ZUHD (16K)
High MP is not for billboards, it’s for large format prints seen up close, in galleries, on large posters (bus stops for instance), and other OOH placements that put you within 10 ft. Billboards, the ones you see on highways barely have a resolution of 50dpi, because you’re seeing them from hundreds of feet away.
Fstoppers Lol, commented after the introduction, guess I should have watched the video first, you explained it well.
Sterling Sanders it is PPI, not DPI. you missed the difference explained in the video.
The percentage of photographers having their work shown as you described is quite small.
Samtagri No. My comment was specifically talking about what Out of Home (OOH) printers set for large scale prints, 45-60 DPI on average. I'm discussing DPI because it does have an effect on the print output. While DPI is primarily the printers domain, they will discuss with you viewing location and distance because a higher DPI produces better image tonality and smoother color blending, but also costs more because it uses more ink. PPI alone is not a determination of quality or clarity, it is a determination of resolution scale, that scale mixed the actual resolution (MP) of your photo, the viewing distance and the DPI of the print together are what determines quality and clarity. As for the "small percentage," you speak of, every Advertising Art Director I know has dealt with this, photographers and designers alike. If you live in a city, you see many large scale up close images on a regular basis, all of those were photographed, designed and printed by people. There are hundreds of thousands of people worldwide that work this on a regular basis.
high mp is for close viewing on large surfaces and cropping.
Its not true. High MP is there for having real estate. With High MP you can crop without loosing much of resolution because you have so much. This makes it much easier to fix stuff.
Also you do see high MP on High Resolution Displays
I used to work for Tanger Outlets, we did all our billboards at 100dpi. That said, we would also do slate board style walkup ads in the centers, usually on plinths or in POPs. Those things needed to be 300dpi, and the resolution needed to be huge. I'm talking about upscaling an 18mp image four times. With final filesizes on the order of gigabytes.
Robert Ralph ppi not dpi ;)
Finally somebody says it. I'm a graphic designer over 7 years and got into photography 2 years ago and I've seen the size of some of the images we've used in the past at work to produce billboards with. One company quoted us to only needing an image at 150dpi.
I have to say I rarely ever hear the term ppi, as when dealing with printers, they're only concerned with dpi. Great video as always lads! This also added to my reasoning of switching from Canon 6D to Fuji XT2, no regrets on that switch, loving the Fuji system.
My favorite camera ever!
Got XT1 and love it.
But...but...its Canon!Has to be the best, right? j/k nice call on switching to Fuji! Now just switch to Sony and you will be even better : )
6D is still very good camera...
I do Prepress for large format printing and we use a minimum of 100dpi, not only because of the viewing factor but also try telling a printer to RIP a 30ft banner at 300 dpi, it might not even render.
9 Years ago I took a photo class with 6 other photographers. I had a simple Rebel XTi, the others had high resolution monsters with lots of L glass (or the Nikon equivalent). About half way through the teacher talked about shooting models for billboards on a 2MP camera and still seeing the images today (in 2009) on billboards. For the next 20 minutes he talked about how MP don't matter....he made these other photographers really uncomfortable. As a newbie to digital, it was glorious! haha
Spend money on lenses not megapixels.
The geg is, that sensor resolution is relatively cheap, while lens reach is bloody heavy and expensive. Anybody doing reach photography or macro photography gains from higher resolution sensor, because you have to crop a lot. Then You might end up with those 2-4Mpx...
Spend money on weed
Bartosz Olszewski No! Grow weed & sell it to buy more lenses!
Orrrrr… You can just buy old “enlarger lens”, for 5-150$, since in macro you don’t actually need auto focusing. And any “Industar-52” for two bucks can squeeze the shit out of most modern sensors. ^^
Natorisama that will not work in many cases, and it's one more thing to fiddle and carry. Not convenient.
Resolution can make all the difference. The final work can be low-res but you will need that extra resolution for layout, cropping , etc. any modification/transformation you do, megapixel matters.
well, only if you don't know what you need. It's handy, but not necessary with good planning.
luan maia.....yeah stupid, he said that.
Most standard format billboards start life as a 10 or so Inch wide art board in illustrator. I know this because I am a graphic designer and I make billboards for archaic dinosaur clients from time to time.
@@agro0 Good planning doesn't guarantee you'll get as close to a snow leopard as you want.
@@agro0
While I prefer to get the composition spot on, as cropping wastes some of my camera's capability, there are times I have no choice but to crop. Shooting wide on my compact, for example, produces very soft corners (as the lens doesn't cover the entire sensor at it's widest), so I crop to sidestep this side effect. For "Macro" shooting, I've little choice but to crop in as I lose a lot of minimum focus distance when zoomed in.
My favorite prints and images for that matter were shot on a Nikon D70 ( 6 mp ) , i now have a D750 and yes I love the bells and whistles but dont get caught up in all that malarky. Get out there and start taking pics!
Love it ... dispelling the myths. I have met so many photographers that insist they must use the most expensive of everything and the highest resolution of everything. I always knew that was actually a cover for lack of skill or the fear of the lack of skill.
Dante Velasquez hehe give me cheap equipment and expensive equipment an I will produce good stuff with both, but I now for larger print you will prefer the more expensive. But the lens, light and skills is the most important!
sad but true..im guilty..but oh well.. a7r3 :)
true!
Lenses... Now that´s a different story.
no, they are just stupid. just like people think apple computers cost more so they must be better LOL
Myth busted!
Hey... love your vids too. thanks for making them
Such videos are a great value addition to aspiring photographers who otherwise get misled by stores. Thanks.
I bought a nikon D3s wich is 12MP "only" and the workflow of the files is amazing,also the need of space is minimal,12MP is enough for most things!
I shoot with a D3 and D800e. After watching this video my D3 just gained a few more years of life. My D800e maybe another decade. But yes it's nice to have that extra resolution when you really need it. Great video!!!
A great description. The only reason I can see for high-megapixel cameras is for cropping. Simply put, if for whatever reason one was not able to fully utilize the entire frame for a shot, a high-megapixel camera will still provide plenty of resolution for just that.
For everything else... such a high MP count is ridiculous, but memory and storage manufacturers love them!
I love how unbiased this channel is and Lee and Patrick are with stuff!
The only reason I personally like high resolution is green screening. It really REALLY helps.
I have been in the sign and grand format printing industry for 20 years and have been trying to explain this to potential customers for at least that long. Nice Job!
I just printed a 10 feet by 6 feet photo for an exhibition, using a "cheapo" APS-C Fuji X-T20 with 24 Mpix, and I can say, the results look jaw dropping, even when I examine the details from 1 feet. (Yes I was using that incredible 56mm 1.2 lens at f5.6 when I took the photo for maximum sharpness, but it's a different story)
Trufully, sensors use three photosites to make up pixel data value that build up an image. Your computer screen even displays R,G,B diode colors to build a pixel data value projection. Surely your client wants what your client wants. Then there is discussion about texture, your eye at distance may not be able to resolve details at a given limit, but the ability to discern texture in those pixels extends beyond resolution. I can’t resolve the blades of grass looking at a still shot of the video post, but the blades of real grass compared to the posture do reveal texture. Even your jeans that you ware at distance to my view reveal a quality different then the plastic poster material, neither of which can I resolve with the eye. There is something to be said about large photosites compared to small ones with regards to noise and color depth. 🙏
In galleries I always peek up close, not just with photographs, but with paintings. I love looking at something like a Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud painting and looking at the brushwork. One of the reasons I also shoot with film is is the visual texture of the grain in certain film stocks some simply see this as an undesirable flaw, I don't at all. I love the clarity of higher end digital prints and think they're amazing, but I love silver gelatin and ilfochrome done traditionally as equally if not more. These are not techniques and practices that should not be lost and I dislike the attitude that *sometimes* comes along with early adopters that newer is automatically better. I love new tech and more megapixels, but throwing certain things under the bus is a grave mistake. There's 35mm stock out there you theoretically can blow up to nearly 3.5 meters wide and not see any "horrible" grain (ADOX CMS 20). Though no low light for that stuff.
P.s before anyone says you can imitate film in digital post, you can't. When I see a 'pushed' or 'pulled' image done with a preset say in VSCO all it looks like they've done is alter the contrast and saturation to get an approximation. Why would I take one medium, say like a water colour, scan it and then make it look like an oil painting in Photoshop filter because I changed my mind or something. Plus, it's cheap.
Absolutely love my film, I don't do enough of it or enough traditional printing with digital negatives. Got to say I love knowing a thing about printers, people go crazy over a pixel, but if you tell the printer to spread the dots out it gives a similar effect as film grain. People seem to accept it better because its a dot instead of a square. Still, there's nothing like silver.
Buy film not megapixel.
100% agree.
Adox cms 20 ii is absurd
High resolutions are not so much for the final products unless having the ability to crop really maters to you. Higher resolutions are important when doing image post processing as they provide much more data to those processes and helps with different corrections.
For all our website and graphic design photography we still use a trusty old Canon 30D - and we STILL need to compress the files sometimes. Takes amazing pictures and they are £50 in mint used condition.
More MP also means more cropping without significant resolution loss and makes editing easier
Yes, and more noise.
I learned this when i had the privilege to talk to Ralph McQuarrie about his matte paintings that he made for the Star Wars movies. I asked how he could make those paintings so live like and sharp on such a huge screen like used in Imax theaters. The answer was similar, if it looks sharp at 2-3ft it will look just as sharp on a huge screen with the appropriate distance. With matte paintings light is very important and painting those highlights are made easier by this effect as your eyes and brain will add details where there is none. I have noticed with cameras that are older and have lower resolution that they are able to catch more light as the individual 'pixels' that catch the light are much larger. More resolution is not always an advantage and lower resolutions can be used effectively in certain scenarios.
I work at Daktronics in South Dakota. We manufacture displays for all sorts of venues from large advertisements to the largest NFL display (Atlanta Falcons Halo Display). The Falcons display pixel is 3 LEDs in RGB at approximately 1cm apart. From the stands the display looks like it is in HD. You should take a tour of the Brookings SD plant if you get a chance.
This is why I just purchased a D3 having already D700, D300s and D200 :D
Thanks for confirming this guys.
Less MP > less disk space > less backup space > faster sharing > All good in my book.
Cheers!
Best explanation of pixels/DPI/viewing distance ever!
I remember in my dad's business, when I was a kid in the 70s, the company would receive billboard materials for products the we sold. The dots were like an inch of so in diameter and quite a lot of white space around. When standing way back the dots would converge.
When I ran the FujiFilm Mini Lab at work, we printed about 350 DPI. We did this so it was just a little better than needed for the eye. It worked out about 2.8mp for a 6x4 image.
Reminds me of those video screens from those musicians these days. If you see them up close it's just some green, blue and red dots. But from far away you actually see your idol performing.
So, even there you don't need like 800kp resolution. (Which there are probably no cameras capable of anyway)
Nice to have this resolution issue spelled out. Years ago I took a picture with my 6 MP camera and printed a 20 inch x 30 inch picture that I framed and hung in our house. The resolution looks great at the distance we view it from. Thanks for doing the math on this.
Very well explained. There are certainly some reasons for high resolution but i agree, in most cases its not needed. As a relativly poor and unexperienced photographer like me, its nice to be able to crop afterwards.
OutOfCuriosity well, as a photographer who shot on 24mp for six or so years I can say that 24mp is plenty for cropping. I shoot lots of events where one sometimes doesn't have time to change lenses and its nice to be able to crop, but I almost never crop more than 2x and that would still give me 6mp, which is still plenty for doing prints and web-based stuff, just no posters, but when I shoot posters I mostly have enough time to set up my shot so I don't need to crop. I will probably keep shooting on 24mp for the next six years to come because it's just the perfect balance between resolution and file-size.
Even if you need more pixels you can always tweak the pixel density using Photoshop or any Photo tool with a few clicks of the mouse.
Also should be noted that the advances in printer technologies are allowing for larger and larger prints while getting the same image quality. Combine that with the huge megapixel count of some dslr's and the limits are only paper size...
Using PPI on display is confusing, especially with retina display which use pixel doubling. There is however a nice feature where you can preview real print dimenions on screen. Set the screen resolution under general settings. In order to get the correct number, divide your display resolution by the width of the display in inch
Good one. And it goes even further when it comes to things like pixel shift technology (e.g. from Pentax, Sony and Olympus). With a Pentax K-1, you already have 36MP without an AA-filter. Pixel shift takes 4 exposures so you have to be on a tripod and if there's any movement in the image, you're going to have to process it with Pentax's own software. Taking images this way just seems a very nerdy thing to do.
But they might sell more cameras this way.
My general rule of thumb is to acquire at least 4x the resolution of the required output resolution. So, for 2-3MP output (which covers 90%+ of uses) acquire at 8-12MP. This accounts for the fact that modern bayer array cameras aren't capturing full RGB at the sensor resolution. My general practice is to take the raw capture and reduce by 50% for retouching, then reduce by 50% again for digital delivery, so for a modern camera (like The EOS R5), raw capture is 8192x5462 into Adobe LR, do basic exposure, WB, Contrast, Saturation, from there export a 16 bit TIFF at 4096x2730 for retouching in PS, then from there, deliver a maximum of 2048x1366, rarely deliver the 4096x2730 image. Full HD resolution looks fine at pretty much every print size, and on pretty much every display, especially when it's super sharp because it was originally acquired at a much higher resolution. You don't need 45+MP to capture at though. As long as you're capturing at least 8-12MP, Full HD output resolution is totally fine.
The video and many of the comments are only discussing one reason for high resolution (print size) and if looked at objectively, one can find several reasons for wanting more pixels than absolutely necessary. Here just two reasons I like high resolution images: if my composition is less than perfect I can freely crop half of my photo away and still have good resolution for large prints and what about zooming in on a photo (different kind of crop) such as a shot of the moon or a small bird photo.
Excellent point about viewing distance with prints -- many definitely forget about that (very) important point.
Bang ON! -, endless HD filling up with gigs of oversized photos. Even phone cameras are oversized in megapixels. Great photo taking, good glass and less compression are more important. Most of the pix displayed are screen res and that is around 1 MB. Save your money.
I photograph artwork for small museums and galleries. In this case resolution is important so people can study the fine details of a work and god forbid something happen to an original there is as good as possible of a backup digital copy. And thats all of course in uncompressed raw.
I also photograph live bands. For that 24 megapixels is plenty. For that stuff i usually do raw+12MP jpegs on a mix of apsc and full frame
Great video, great message!!!
Resolution is probably the single most overrated parameter in modern cameras. My lower end camera, a 4yo Fuji X camera, has 16MP. Way enough...
Great point for billboards. Personally I like to get closer to poster-size pictures. Then I could see the pixels.
Absolutely! I'm getting tired of constantly hearing "You don't *Need* that resolution unless you're printing BILLBOARDS!" etc. Usually in response to them not wanting to buy a medium format camera or judging you for wanting to spend your money. Everybody's so quick to tell you what you don't *Need* as if pixels are the only benefits, forgetting the massive dynamic range improvements, recoverable shadow details, increased tonal range, smoother gradients, less false color, increased sensor sharpness, fewer lens flaws, less noise, more detail, etc. Feel free to stay ignorant, people. Just don't tell me what I should do with *MY* money.
That's the reason why its easier, and faster work flow with less strain on my laptop nef files from my D700 than D800. Thank you Lee for sharing this; a validation of practical megapixel requirement.
The old school print megapxl wars (and I neeed it for billboard argument) were over 10years ago. The new megapxl war is about use in digital multi-media, downloads, big screens, zooming & cropping, 4k photo/video, etc.... Who buys a $4000 camera in 2018 only for print work? Hey, but I love you guys and this is really good to know.
It's the difference between creative photography and digital data gathering. Creative photography demands no great fidelity, but lots of ingenuity. Digital data gathering is a technical exercise in which the viewer enlarges an image 400%, looks into the corners and declares the photograph inadequate. It's an interesting exercise but has nothing to do with an emotional response to an image. Which is what photography is all about.
Borderlands The statement "what photography is all about" is totally subjective. We are over 20 years into the digital era. Love it, leave it, or get left. Keep living in "the good old days" and see where that get you.
Yes, photography is totally subjective. The exceptions are surveillance, medical, astronomy, and similar technical media. A 4k monitor is 8mp. A 24 mp sensor covers any current commercial format. Most photographers are not professional (let's say fewer than 1% of people reading this), and of those professionals very few exhaust the capacity of a 50mp camera and even fewer have the lenses to resolve it.
So to conclude, almost nobody reading this needs the resolution of a current professional digital camera, and none require one to pursue photography as a creative medium.
Borderlands good point
Great video! Even further justified why I just re-purchased a D700 :-)
easily one of the best cameras out there. love mine. all you need is 8mp. really.
Usually, it's ideal to work with an image twice the resolution the final product needs to be. If you add text, put multiple pictures together and so on, when you scale it down it'll look sharper.
A little late to the party but this is so true. I have blown out 8mp pictures from my samsung phone to a1 size canvas and they look stunning AF. I really don't know why pixel peepers go off their gun about having the latest biggest sensor available. Thanks for this video.
What I really like on this channel is, that you just show that it is photography! doesn't depend if you have an expensive gear. thx :-D
yep i worked on ads and you can pretty much use a 1024x768 image to print anything you want, unless your client is like high-end, in which case they'll know to provide decent pictures in the first place. of course you better treat the image a bit, but the source material doesn't need to be super high res. heck some people would send me tiny 640x480 shots and i'd make it work with interpolation and filters. sure, it was NEVER ideal and only gave me more work, but my point is... well i've already stated it, lol.
Tbh I've never known a pro photographer claim they need high megapixels for billboards, advertising in general yes, because there's plenty of big adverts that are at ground level, those are the ones that require 50MP+ as people can go and stand right in front of them. At the end of the day a photographer doesn't think about whether they need high megapixel count or not when buying a camera, they just tally that into the many things to think about when comparing potential products. As you already said, the main advantage to higher MP is the ability to crop the image in more in post which is a very common thing to do, so they're probably not really thinking about how big they can blow the image up, they, like the rest of the world, just counts it as an advantage if the camera they're interested in has a higher MP count than another camera.
It all depends on what you want to do. I printed a 500 MP panorama 4m x 1m (around 280 ppi). Why I needed that resolution? I wanted the spectator to be able to discover all the little details of that beautiful skyline and get really close to it.
Two things not mentioned in this video: Down sampling a high MP images end in better quality than taking the same picture with lower MP camera; and the diversity of executions you have with a high MP image are much more considerable. As someone who works in advertising, the usage options for using a singular execution in a wide variety of contexts (near-field OOH, far-field OOH, various digital context) is much more important. There has never been a time when I've received a file as thought, "oh no, the resolution is to high," but I have thought the reverse. The more resolution the better imo. As a photographer higher MP is worth it for the cropping ability-while maintaining visual quality-alone.
Great explanation of PPI and DPI and overall great video! However the opening statement of "Most professional DSLR's are over 50 Mega pixels" just isn't true. The Canon 5DS and 5DS R barely reach over that at 50.6MP. Anything over 50 starts getting into medium format.
Please tell me that before you threw away the billboard you measured the actual pixels? As you scooted down the #4 with your finger it looked like maybe 4-5PPI? That way you can compare the viewing distance numbers with how it was actually printed.
I have seen other people make the argument about viewing distance, but bravo for actually getting that print, well played.
I need high MP because it has more detail when I look up close on a screen.
You do need something much larger for giant art prints that are viewed much closer. Apple Stores use giant high resolution images for the art along the sides of the store.
I rented a Canon 5D Mark III, 6 years ago to do a billboard. It came out AMAZING. I thought, at the time, that it wouldn't be enough PPI/DPI. I agree with the conclusion here, because since then I've learned more about how light and depth and angle drop off. The human's eye and perception is good, but it's not AMAZING.
I’ve been saying this forever. I always bring up the fact that people were printing billboards with the 5D classic 13years ago. And even on older cameras back when digital went full frame and everyone was stoked.
"Most of the DSLR's has over 50MP" - uhm.. No.
Tino Petersson Most PROFESSIONAL DSLR’s are over 50 MP.
still aint true mate
Hexium Please enlighten me. Which typical proffesional DSLR's has +50MP :)? I currently own both the Sony A7RIII (42.4MP) and the Canon 1DX MK 2 (20.2MP). And I would catergorize these models as pretty proffesional DSLR's. What did I miss?
The eos 5ds is the only one i'm aware of, and that's like 50.6 mp so not even that much higher
I agree, but apparently our friend Hexium knows something we don't, so I can't wait to see his reply!
When I started as a digital tech we were using 6mp digital backs for billboards and no one seemed to care. The biggest excuse I've heard for buying a 100mp back is that you could shoot a full length shot and crop out a portrait if your client needed it.
This same principle applies to tvs. The average living room setup places the tv far enough from the sofa that 1080 HD is as much as you need on a 50-60 inch screen. 4K on the same size screen doesn't make a difference unless you sit within 6 feet of the TV. At the store you stand that close, the TV dazzles you, and you pay hundreds more for a feature that doesn't actually make a difference.
This is a limited experiment because it looks at only one aspect of a photograph. It also makes an error in looking at the graphics while discussing the photograph. The number 4 is produced in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop and its resolution is independent from the photograph. Secondly, while a high quality lens can produce high sharpness in a low resolution photograph, usually low resolution sensors are paired with lower quality lenses and good sharpness is absent in that case. Thirdly, an image contains much more than edge sharpness. Higher Mp images produce more detail between the sharp edges and this extra detail is visibly absent from lower Mp images even at larger distances. Fourth, the same image reproduced on a billboard will be printed in many media from online to art magazines, each with various resolution requirements. Fifth, long before the image is on the billboard it must be sold to the client and he or she will be looking at prints up close and more Mp do make a difference at that point. Sixth, the graphic designer wants high resolution delivered so he/she can crop etc as much as they want - try telling a graphic designer that 2Mp is enough and you will be laughed off the job. Seventh, while digital sensors have excellent edge sharpness at lower Mp levels, and is superior to film, digital color resolution is not as good and only matches film at the 20Mp+ mark. In theory 2 Mp are enough, but in practice, about 18/20Mp or more is the current resolution suitable for most professional jobs for quality results.
I am not a phtographer but i find the extra pixels helpful when editing, like scaling and such. Also you can zoom in after you've taken the photo and so on. Its just more to work with. Same reason why you don't record a song with a 320 bitrate even though you upload it in that form.
Great video , there is only one reason for high mp count , you said it cropping ,other than that its just chasing perceived progress , many thanks
I wish I could upvote this twice
Nice, I learnt this a while ago.. the bigger the print the less resolution needed. the smaller , the more is resolution required ! Learn this guys !
Great video. I'm doing a bit of research because I'm about to shoot a billboard. Looks like my 5D mark iv is more than up for the task. Thanks for this quality information. I've taken a couple of courses from Fstoppers and thus far education is my best return on investment, far better than any piece of gear.
Megapixels are really only a factor in cropping a photo. It is nice to be able to crop and blow up one section of a photo and still have it be sharp, even though it may only be 1/10th of the original size. That way you can essentially replace longer focal length lenses without losing much Quality.
If you're not cropping then even a lowly 3 Megapixel camera can be enough for most applications.
*most professional DSLRs these days are over 50 Megapixels*
Um.... Not true at all
Just like wanting a car that can go 300/kmh when you'll never be able to drive it that fast anyways. Great video and very well explained!
Hi, I'm from Germany. What do you mean by saying "never be able to drive it that fast"? ;-)
Phil Campbell you might not ever drive that fast lol
Godfrey Jemand Hp is completely relative
well, there are another reason tho..
mostly we need that higher pixel count for other use like super sampling, as we know, we almost never take a perfect shot to begin with, unless in highly controlled studio enverioment. so we use these extra pixel to produce good end result.
i agree 2mp is mostly what we need, but for these perfect 2 mp, i like 18 mp camera so much that it combine 9 pixel to 1 to produce perfect 2 mp image.
One word. Astrophotography. You want more pixels so you can get higher resolution images of extremely faint and distant objects. If your sensor has more pixels, you can crop deeper after the fact and will be able to pull a lot more information from your image. That’s why I’m able to get a recognizable image of Bode’s galaxy with a 50mm f1.8 lens and an APS-C sensor camera body. Also the cigar galaxy in the same shot.
those backlit scrolling banner bilboards have quite high resolution printed on canvas because they're read from very up close at train/subway stations
He literally says that at the end of the video.
I want more resolution for retouching and cropping options. more details means more to pull from. Better sharpening too.
Very nice topic well executed. But I think there still will be a noticeable difference in end result (viewing distance) between 2 mega pixel camera shots printed in 2 mega pixel and a high pixel camera shots downscaled to 2 mega pixel print as higher quality camera captures more details. Similar example with 4k video downscaled to 1080p. Great video nonetheless!
I don’t agree that “professional” cameras are 50MP. There are lots of pro cameras less than 50MP. File
Size is another pit fall to 50MP+. But... tack sharp images are nice. Great video guys!
Thanks to lossless compression algorithms, those 50MP images shouldn't be nearly as big as you think they'll be. Largest CR3 file I've seen from my M50 was like 40 megabytes, where uncompressed would be around 126 megabytes ((24*14*3)/8)
You‘re totally right (of course). But sadly i see many wall prints and 3m x 2m printed nature shots where you easily get as close as 0,5m and its horryble because they would need the 50mpx hassleblad but they are almost never sharp enough
Very interesting, i guess for photographers like me, to get a good quality print for an exhibit, at home or an exhibition, a 300dpi is essential, as have seen people getting too close to big prints and admiring or criticizing the details, be it a landscape or a macro
Depends, I'll happily drop down to 200ppi for my prints. More often I'll tell the printer to spread the dots apart if I need to go bigger because it gives a better result. People will go crazy if they think they recognize a pixel in the image, but don't bat an eye at seeing a cluster of dots.
It also encourages people to get their noses off my prints X)
Great, my fiancée just watched this and now I can’t get a Z7. Thanks.
Awesome content guys.
:D :D :D :D :D
I have a couple images circulating on some digital billboards and was curious why they wanted me to size them down so small! Very interesting stuff 🤘🏻
4:50 - Tell the customer you'll shoot their photo on a 15 year old cellphone, because it will be *good enough for them* at viewing distance.
I had great fun back in the early 1970s producing massive prints for the Forestry Commission display at the Melbourne Show. By massive, I mean the photo was split into sections six feet high (the width of the Ilford photo paper rolls) and exposed by projecting the image onto the paper taped to the darkroom walls, then developed with buckets of developer and kitchen squeegee mops on the floor (we had a floor drain in the specially designed darkroom at HQ). It took many sections to produce the final displays. Even better, we were using large format glass negatives from the late 19th century. Mostly 5 x 4 but also some 10 x 8 negs. People would stand about six feet away or more to see the detail of those early railway and forestry scenes in colonial Australia. Even though the lenses back then were at best Cooke triplets, the results nearly a century later were very impressive.
You may not need 50 megapixels, or even the 500 megapixels or more that large format film can offer, but if you have it, it's awesome. So no apologies for owning a Nikon D850 today or having a trunk full of medium and large to very large format negs from my film days, when I almost never used 35mm. I probably crop most of my images now as then, as composition and afterthought dictates, especially for wildlife; having that high megapixel sensor is no different than when I was shooting all day with 5 x 4 film and revelled in the detail it offered. Just look closely at all these wonderful old large format shots at Shorpy to see what I mean.
www.shorpy.com/
In Austria Most of the ads are on walls right beside the streets because in the city there are a lot of bus stops where you stand and wath your surroundings.
That so true! I was billboard printer tech from 1997 till 2005!
A good common sense video! Nicely made and explained, but I still want my Fujifilm GFX50!!
The video would be more convincing if we would focus on a portrait and no in a number which would probably be inserted digitally into the big board. I have seen some commercial applications where resolution is a must. But it is true, no everybody needs tons of megapixels, those cameras are for very specific applications only.
High end product shots need the resolution for post cropping for different distributions. Those in the know don't say billboards b3cause they know better.
As much as I agree with this video as well as the article, there is no mention of the actual dpi and ppi of the billboard in the video! Given your calculations of 4ppi, it is clearly visible in the video, that this billboard is printed at a much higher resolution. I am really interested to find out what ACTUAL billboards resolution are in addition to the calculations. (It may be that this billboard was printed much higher than necessary, but would be good to know.)
Well, printing at high DPI doesn't ad much to the cost, so why not (although it doesn't do anything). The PPI of the billboard were also higher in the billboard shown in the video, simply because the camera's relosution allowed it. But the point he's trying to make is that you could have went down even further to 4ppi and it would have been fine.
That billboard was printed from a 24.5”w x 7.5”h, 300dpi, CMYK file (without bleed, 15.12 MP). The artwork is a composite of several images, and the photo of the girl in the adirondack chair was taken with an iPhone. Layered photoshop files usually get sent to the billboard printer, so vector text prints a little cleaner than the raster layers, and the printed vinyl ends up being about 12.5 ppi (before any upsampling is done in the print software). I share an office with the creative team, AMA.
Yea....there are photographers who sometimes see composition within composition in a picture...so high resolution will be fruitful when cropping...
I loved the way you ripped that billoboard at the end. hahaha
Thanks for that. I've said for years that MP count is marketing. I shoot nothing higher than 12MP (D700, D300s, Lumix LX100); I'd go to 16 or 20 if Nikon came out with a true D700 replacement but as much as anything it would be for the improved DR and low light performance that a newer sensor would give.
As you highlight and I like to say, no-one ever looked at a good photograph from usual viewing distance then got in really close and said it would have been improved for higher resolution.
In any case I spend most of the time shooting film these days. What's that - 16MP at best? Later this year I'm going on a three-week photo tour with a couple of NIkon F3s and my old ME Super.
On the list of things that make a great image, resolution is somewhere near the bottom.
I got it and was well explained as usual, but still love that insane resolution of my 5dsr. You can crop an image at 50% and still use that area for working for whatever you need. At least I use that excuse. :)
I use a Sony a7s for stills only. 12 megapixel only yet I print poster size without discernible loss of image quality (and that’s not taking correct viewing distance into account). This “crop sensor medium format” camera’s image quality more than compensates for the smaller file size. Sharpness and resolution are overrated but that’s clever marketing at work. If I do require a larger file I use a tele lens and stitch.