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What is the maximum printing size of classic 5d??

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whlee27

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 12, 2012
3
0
Recently, one of my frineds ask me to take a picture for his restaurant to display. i have only classic 5D and it provides only 12mp as we know. The thing is that he wants to print the image at least 1m x 1m with good quality.*

is there anyone have printing experienced that big image with 5D?

if you have any advice, please let me know.

thank you.
 
Lightroom will let you enlarge a print as you export it from raw to jpg or tif formats. You should be able to get it to at least half a meter in Lightroom. Then there are standalone programs that use fractal formulae that can enlarge the file.
 
whlee27 said:
if you have any advice, please let me know.

thank you.
Click to expand...

Rent a Hasselblad for the day.

But short of that, it really does come down to display considerations. Is this going into a museum, or a lobby where people are not going to be examining that closely? In that case, 100 dpi might really be enough. Also, how clean are your images? The key, I think would be to minimize noise and artifacts, anything that might be distracting when enlarged.
 
The 5Dc produces 4,368 × 2,912 images.

If you're making a print of 1m on the longest edge, you're getting ~44 pixels/cm, or about 111 pixels/inch. That's obviously below the 240-300 pixels/inch that most print shops recommend, but that 240-300 ignores the intended use of the image. For something hanging on a wall, that's going to be viewed from 6-10 feet away most of the time, I would think that 110 pixels/inch is just fine.

Look at it this way: the best MF digital back on the market today is the PhaseOne IQ180, which produces images of 10328 x 7760. At 1m on the long edge, that's ~262 pixels/inch; still below 300 ppi. And you definitely do not need an IQ180 to shoot a 1m print.

Bottom line: you'll be fine.
 
Before I retired , I had access to a 42" HP inkjet printer ( a z6100 if I remember right) . Used to print stuff from my 5D up to 22x34 all the time with good results , 36x48 occasionally . Usually I'd up the size and keep resolution to 200-240ppi in PS before printing . I'd get a huge file , 40MB or so , but it would print out just fine. Probably your image is going to be viewed from a couple of feet so you'll be OK.
 
As long as customers in the restaurant aren't sitting right on top of the print, you should be fine with 1mx1m. I have made plenty of large prints when I owned my 5Dc without any issues.
 
At that size the best thing you can do is to use a tripod to shoot the photo. If you have any kind of camera shake it will be noticeable. Much more than any potential pixelation.

If the shot is static (mostly) why not shoot a grid of photos? Something like 2 across and 2 down. Photoshop and other cheaper applications can stitch them together to create a much bigger image. Panoramic images are not just for panoramic landscapes, eh?
 
It all depends on the viewing distance: I've had 3~5 megapixel images blown up to 30x45 cm^2 which looked fine from typical viewing distances. Of course, if you stick your nose to the glass, you'll see pixels, but IMHO if the photo is good, people tend to focus on the content rather than pixel peeping. Also, I had film scanned to 16 megapixel tiffs and had that printed on ~50x80 cm^2 (perhaps a tad larger), also looked great. But there, the pixelation was even less of an issue since it was the scan of a grainy B&W negative, and the grain added to the atmosphere.

Even though 1 m x 1 m is quite large, I would just try it and hang up the result on a wall. Look at it from typical distances and judge for yourself. As I said, I believe that if the photo is good, most people are not even noticing the technical flaws. Plus, you do your friend a favor, it's not as if you're working for an ad agency or something :)
 
whlee27 said:
Recently, one of my frineds ask me to take a picture for his restaurant to display. i have only classic 5D and it provides only 12mp as we know. The thing is that he wants to print the image at least 1m x 1m with good quality.*

is there anyone have printing experienced that big image with 5D?

if you have any advice, please let me know.

thank you.
Click to expand...

One trick you can try is this. If you have the photo already, use that - if not, take a test photo under the same conditions.

In Photoshop, or the image editor of your choice, blow the image up to the final size. Note that you may start bumping up against the limits of what your system can do efficiently.... i.e. if you don't have enough RAM it will need to write to the scratch disk. Also note that Photoshop typically uses 5 to 7 times (iirc) of RAM as the size of the image. Be patient, it'll finally open up.

Anyway, blow the image up to the final size. Choose a few test patches in the image that are the same size as a typical piece of paper that your desktop printer uses. Crop out the rest of the image leaving just that patch and print it. Reverse the steps and choose a new patch, until you feel you have some good typical areas of the photo printed. Now tape them to the wall, and step back, and judge how they hold up.

If you shot a test photo, and they don't hold up, then perhaps you can reshoot using different settings until you find something that works for you, which you can then use to inform your photo taking at the restaurant.

Good Luck.
 
Something else you can do quickly/easily/cheaply is to take an existing equivalent photo and based on the calculations for the 1m x 1m, take crops from that image and print them in whatever the largest print size that is easily/cheaply available for you.

For example, I can get up to 16" x 20" prints cheaply in <4 hours, so taking the original and quickly cropping it into four sections to create montague layout of:

(16H x 20W)(16H x 20W)
(16H x 20W)(16H x 20W)


...would result in a 32" x 40", which is close enough for this exercise to get quick read on if the DPI resolution is going to be an issue.

For me personally (YMMV), the total time/cost to run this experiment would probably be 20 minutes of my time to create the four crops from the original and upload them to my local print service, $20 for the four prints (yes, <$5 each!), another 30 minutes to run the errand to go down to the store to pick up the prints when they're done, then 10 minutes to arrange and hang them up on a wall to take a look ... call it $20 and ~1 man-hour.


-hh
 
snberk103 said:
If the shot is static (mostly) why not shoot a grid of photos? Something like 2 across and 2 down. Photoshop and other cheaper applications can stitch them together to create a much bigger image. Panoramic images are not just for panoramic landscapes, eh?
Click to expand...

Excellent suggestion (unless the OP has already shot the subject his friend wants a print of). But panorama images are great because they produce large resolution images which are ideal for large format printing.
 
No problem. Just make a great photo, and print it as large as you want. I can recommend some bicubic upscaling prior to printing, as it makes the image a little softer, but at viewing distance, it just looks great. I make many really large prints from a D700, and it is well suited for that.

If you want to do the panorama thing: only do it with a shift-lens. With a regular wide angle, it will look more horrible than a single shot.
 
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