question on cropping a picture

[lance70]

Hi, I have a question on cropping a picture, if I have a photo and I crop it, will that degrade the picture? I have several images that were 5MB and after I crop them, they are about 1.2-1.7MB. If I try printing 4x6 or 8x10 images will the picture quality still be as good as the larger MB size? Thanks.



Lance

 

[Overread]

cropping won't degrade the image quality at all. I am guessing (looking at your print sizes) that your using a crop sensor camera and want the prints to fit to the paper size - cropping like that should not give you any quality problems at all.
The only time you might encounter problems is if you crop a lot off the shot and then increase its size to compensate for the lost frame - this could lead to the shot looking a little softer even with sharpening.

 

[lance70]

thanks! well my wife and I are just learning all this on the computer, I was trying to crop some pictures to bring the main subject out a bit, they were saved as jpeg. I was reading how many people save their pictures as raw? I'm really confused as to what that all means honestly, We just want to print some pictures out for people in the family at Christmas time, and I didn't want to mess things up, thanks for the help!

 

[Overread]

Ahh RAW is a whole different ballgame - as your starting out I would not overly worry about RAW yet - concentrate on learning the basics of shooting and also editing - once sharpening, contrast, sturation, levels, curves and noise removal are things that you can understand and do in editing then it the time to really appraoch RAW

try reading some of these articles:
http://www.ronbigelow.com/articles/articles.htm
easy to understand and provides some good help in editing and also some shooting advice as well

 

[lance70]

Great! thank you very much we are going to check that out now.

 

[kundalini]

If your camera allows, shoot both in RAW and your largest JPEG setting. Later when you get a handle in the RAW processing and have a photo that you really liked, you can go back. It may seem crazy to use up all that extra space on your hard drive, so only keep the keepers in RAW.

I know in the beginning I wish I had done that. Got a couple of shots that I really, really like but am at a disadvantage on the post processing since they were shot in JPEG only.