resolution

[pawparazzi]

Hi there,
I set my camera on Large setting and tried also on RAW and when I open in photoshop the DPI is only 180 when I want at 300, hotshop should not be compressing should it?
Please HELP as to why this is happening.
Thankyou
BEC

[ricktas]

off the top of my head here. The resolution you see is what you have set photoshop too, not what your photo is.

I am not on a PC with photoshop at present, but go to Edit > Preferences > Unit and Rulers (i think) and the default settings are in there.

Someone else might correct me on this, as I am going from memory.

[pawparazzi]

Thankyou but I dont think thats it. I just tried downloading straight from card to windows then I looked at photo and properties and It said horisontal DPI is 180 and vertical is 180,
so therefore it has nothibg to do with photoshop.

[pawparazzi]

WOW this is wierd I just took 3 photos, 1 in large 1 in medim and 1 in small and each one showed a DPI of 180

[arthurking83]

Don't worry too much about the DPI setting for digital files. The actual number of pixels is more important.

Only worry about DPI settings when you print them from the application in question(ie. in this case PS).

As long as you save the image in it's original form, and not downscaled, or downsized. and the number of pixels is the same as how it came out of the camera, you've lost nothing.

The DPI setting simply tells the printer what size to print the image.

[pawparazzi]

Thankyou for that, So If I save photos to a usb or disk and take to the photo lab I will be able to print photos to a large size ie 16x20 or more even? Is it ok to look at the megabites? most of my photos are at about 2-3MB and 2000x3000

[JorgD]

DPI settings are about printing, not about viewing on a monitor or storage.

A quick example hopefully makes this clear. If you took a 18MP photo on a 7D its dimensions are 3888 x 2592. Now the image you take will not change in size no matter what DPI is associated with it. At 180 dpi, if you printed the image, it would end up being 21.6 x 14.4 inches. You may not have a printer that can print that size image, but then again, you may. Now at 300 dpi, the printed image would end up at 13 x 8.64 inches. No matter what you set the dpi to, the pixel image size or quality won't change. It will always be 3888 x 2592 pixels and look the same on a monitor.

Now I used to always set my pictures to 4000 dpi, because it made me feel that they were insanely high resolution, even thought the number of pixels still did not change, but then again I never printed them.

Now if you wanted to print you image on a 4 x 6 inch piece of paper without resizing the image itself, you can just enter 648 in the dpi field of your favourite image editor and your 7D image miraculously would have been transformed into a 4 x 6 print without doing any further editing.