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With all of the advances in digital technology, digital photo can now be viewed almost anywhere through any medium. Most of the time however, you are going to want to print out your photos, typically on standard paper sizes like 4X6 or 5X7. But what should you do if you have that special photo that you want to make an enlargement of? Print enlargement quality is based on your digital camera mega pixels figure. Let’s look at how

There is a certain resolution normally expressed as pixels in every digital photo that you take. The number of pixels can be referred to as one number or sometimes as two numbers; the first depicting the number of pixels over the X axis and the second the number of the Y axis. These two numbers are multiplied together to provide the total number of pixels in the photo.

You are printing these digital pixels onto paper each time you print a digital photo. If the paper size is big relative to the photo resolution, the quality of the print will be poor. Poor quality is often seen by pixelization or the ability to actually see the individual pixels on the print.

That leads us to the question of how do you determine the largest print possible from a particular digital photo? There really is no one exact answer. Not only do the number of pixels help determine photo quality, other factors such as how much detail is in the photo or what the lighting were also play a role. Even the number of pixels can be argued as different people have different views on what is acceptable print quality.

A rough assessment of what comprises a good print quality is based on the pixels density or in other words the number of pixels per inch on the printed photo. This is also known as PPI (pixels per inch) and it represents the number of pixels over an axis line.

Experiments show that the following qualities are usually associated with a specific PPI number:

PPI 100 - fair to bad

PPI 200 - good

PPI 300 and up - very good

The next rational step would be to determine how many mega pixels are needed for good quality printing on a particular paper size. Don’t worry, calculating this number is very easy. All you need to do is to simply multiply the page length by its width in inches, resulting in the number of square inches on the page. Now multiply this number by the square of the PPI number and the result is the number of pixels on the page which is the number of pixels we want our source photo to have. Here are the numbers calculated for some common sizes (for 100,200 and 300 PPI respectively):

page 4X6 0.24MP 1MP 2MP

5X7 0.35MP 1.5MP 3MP

page 8X10 0.8MP 3MP 7MP

page 11X14 1.5MP 6MP 14MP

page 16X20 3MP 12MP 28MP

page 20X30 6MP 24MP 54MP

This table is just an estimation of what is considered a fitting number of mega pixels for different paper sizes. When making enlargements, there are many other factors to consider. Try experimenting with different paper sizes, but be careful as this can get expensive. And remember that there are always exceptions to the rules. Sometimes what is considered poor quality pixelization can actually result in a nice artistic effect in your enlargement. What it comes down to is that while the above calculation helps, common sense and experience are needed to match a particular digital photo to its best possible enlargement size.