This is where Ian Burley, DPNow's editor and founder, shares his unique thoughts and impressions on subjects that he hopes will be of interest to others on the subjects of digital photography and other related or loosely related topics! You can follow DPNow Editor's blog on Facebook and Twitter, too.
Message to all you pixel-peepers
Posted 18-07-09 at 03:24 PM by Ian
If you spend much of your time staring into a computer screen examining images at 100% or 1 image pixel to 1 screen pixel and feeling bewildered about noise and strange pixellated artefacts, my message to you is - you're missing the point!
This week I heard that a camera company VIP from Japan was going to visit my office for a meeting. We'd recently been on a press trip to a nice, sunny, part of Europe to try out his company's forthcoming compact models (note: compacts, not DSLRs are other types of camera with a large-ish sensor). I thought it would be nice to make some prints from some of the shots I'd taken.
I nearly decided against it as, in Lightroom pixel-peeping mode, the grain structure was often alarmingly odd. Luckily, I did a test print on my Epson Stylus Pro 3800, at A2 on a smooth matt paper, and the print looked superb. I did half a dozen A2 prints in the end and my guest was suitably impressed.
The same images look great at screen resolution, too. It's only at 1:1 or 100% that they look rubbish. Yet, it's the evidence of pixel-peeping which drives much of the camera A vs Camera B discussions and debates that litter the Internet and camera magazines.
But cameras are now primarily used for imaging in the Web and for printing. So let those image enivironments do the talking.
This week I heard that a camera company VIP from Japan was going to visit my office for a meeting. We'd recently been on a press trip to a nice, sunny, part of Europe to try out his company's forthcoming compact models (note: compacts, not DSLRs are other types of camera with a large-ish sensor). I thought it would be nice to make some prints from some of the shots I'd taken.
I nearly decided against it as, in Lightroom pixel-peeping mode, the grain structure was often alarmingly odd. Luckily, I did a test print on my Epson Stylus Pro 3800, at A2 on a smooth matt paper, and the print looked superb. I did half a dozen A2 prints in the end and my guest was suitably impressed.
The same images look great at screen resolution, too. It's only at 1:1 or 100% that they look rubbish. Yet, it's the evidence of pixel-peeping which drives much of the camera A vs Camera B discussions and debates that litter the Internet and camera magazines.
But cameras are now primarily used for imaging in the Web and for printing. So let those image enivironments do the talking.
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