On Oct 24, 2010, at 11:01 PM, Walter Gilbert wrote: > Hi all, > > [Insert standard mealy-mouthed plea for forbearance due to inexperience, > acknowledgment of fact that any photographer worth his salt should know, and > insistence that Google was not forthcoming with satisfactory answers, here.] > > I've been doing all of my cropping with software rather than in-camera since > I started taking photos. A fair percentage of the crops I do are pretty > severe. But, it's occurred to me that I may be sacrificing IQ as a > consequence of that tendency, though I don't know. I've searched for > "advantages of in-camera cropping" and other similar key words, but haven't > been able to find any informative material with high relevancy results. So, > I figured I'd ask the Pentaxian Oracles. > > I've always just assumed that cropping in-camera does essentially the same > thing as cropping with software in post-processing. Am I right in that > regard? Or, does the camera perform the task better than, say, IrfanView or > some other basic image editor? > > My routine (admittedly redundant) has been to pull the HD card and cut & > paste the folder into my "Photography" directory, load them into Picasa and > save the original files (typically JPEG) as the "Picasa Originals", then go > about cropping for composition. I do my best to avoid cropping any image > down to anything less than 2400 pixels long-side from the original 4288x2848. > Once I've done my cropping, I resize them down to two resolutions -- 2400 > pixels long-side for prints and 1600 pixels long-side for uploading and > sharing (if I intend to do that with any of the images). > > Am I screwing up by doing this instead of doing most of my cropping > in-camera, or is it six of one, half-a-dozen of the other?
I don't know if I confused the issue by referring to cropping in to tight with the camera. I should have said "framing". In short, any composition that you do after you press the shutter will lose resolution. Therefore for the absolute best image quality, you should shoot exactly the picture that you want. On the other hand, if you shoot a little bit too wide, you may lose an imperceptible amount of resolution, but if you come in too tight, and cut something out of the photo, then there is no way to recover it. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
