Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/06/15
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]on 06/15/03 6:55 AM, Frank Filippone at red735i@earthlink.net wrote: > One would ask why a photojoournalist needs an 11 meg file for the newspaper? > Yes, for some books, etc the resoliution may be nice to have, but the bulk > of the market is news, and if they had 1 Meg files, it would be big enough! > Is this an emulation of film quality for my daily read? Sorry Frank, but that has always been a misunderstanding of how photojournalists work, or what is needed for pre-press. First if all, an 11 megapixel camera does not produce 11 meg files. They are much bigger when open in Photoshop. Not sure how big off the top of my head, but the Canon D60, which is 6.1 or 6.2 megapixels produces an 18 meg jpeg file at the highest resolution in 8-bit color. That's because the photos start at 24 bit, or 8 bits each for the three colors. The software converts it into the larger size as it comes out of the camera. (Rumor has it that Photoshop 8 will run mostly in 16 bit color, doubling file sizes.) Second of all, it is a rare shot that a newspaper uses full frame. Often the cropping is quite severe. At a minimum, I need 3 meg files for any picture I'd put in a paper, after cropping. When you run a big one, you need much more information. And newspaper reproduction has gotten much better as well as what they've needed in the past. And I know, I've heard all the math about minimum sizes, but that's not what my experience tells me I need. I never want to be faced with dealing with minimums. That being said, I publish on much higher quality paper than newsprint now. We use a very high-quality sheet-fed press that's only about 18 months old. It uses all the latest technologies and the quality we get out of it is simply amazing. Our texts have actually been taken to the U.S. Congress to show what kind of quality can be found in distance-education material. (Though we have schools In seven countries as well as have thousands of distance education students). And I can tell you, the minimal thinking of the people who produced our textbooks even just six years ago has become a nightmare for us now. The quality just isn't up to snuff, though they thought at the time nobody would ever run a photo bigger than two columns. Their first mistake was hiring REAL photo editors. :-) We've changed the whole landscape! Our photos don't run that big. Rarely bigger than 9 inches on the long side. And we're quite comfortable with photos in the 8-15 meg size. So the Canon EOS D60 we use now is more than adequate for our needs. In fact, it's pretty much convinced me that film no longer has an edge over digital. I know that's 180 degrees to what I was saying a couple years ago when I was last active in the LUG. But then I'd never seen a digital camera that could match film, and exceed it in many ways, as the D60 back then. Or spent enough time with the may qualities of digital that are clearly superior to film. (i.e. White balance, speed, etc.) - -- Eric Carlsbad, CA "The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with." - -Marty Feldman - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html