Thanks for the info. You summed it up with:
"In short, any composition that you do after you press the shutter will lose
resolution."
I tend to try not to zoom in too close simply because I'm always seeing
things in the backgrounds of my images that make me thing, "Man! Why
didn't I pan over just a little bit more?" Plus, I have this natural
inclination to zoom that disgusts me when I see images taken by other
people that contain elements that I never would have thought to include
in my own shots. So, in that sense, I guess I probably overcompensate.
In any event, your answer was what I suspected the case was. Cropping
is cropping and is not a substitute for compositional framing. I'll
never be a Cartier-Bresson, obviously. But, so far as I know, not many
are. :-)
Thanks again,
Walt
On 10/25/2010 1:13 AM, Larry Colen wrote:
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
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