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 referred to as number of pixels in each digital photo that you take. Pixels can be represented by one number or sometimes as two numbers depicting the number of pixels over the X axis and the number of the Y axis (multiply these two numbers together to determine the total number of pixels in the digital photo).

When you print digital photos you are really printing those digital pixels on paper. If the paper size is very big relative to the digital photo resolution the result will be a poor quality print. One of the most noticeable results of such poor quality is your ability to actually see the individual pixels on the print also known as pixelization.

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 guess of what consists of 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 logical step would be to figure out how many mega pixels are needed for good quality printing on a specific paper size. Fortunately calculating this number is very easy. To do that all you need to do is to simply multiply the page length by its width in inches. The result is the number of square inches on the page. Next 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

8X10 0.8MP 3MP 7MP

11X14 1.5MP 6MP 14MP

page 16X20 3MP 12MP 28MP

page 20X30 6MP 24MP 54MP

This is just a representation of what is considered an appropriate number of mega pixels for various paper sizes. Consider all of the factors when making enlargements. Although it can be expensive, experimenting with different paper sizes is best. Sometimes what is normally poor quality pixelization can actually create a creative artistic effect in a photo. This means that in addition to the above calculations, common sense and experience are also needed to determine the best photo enlargement size for a specific digital photo.