Digital camera files size

How close the color can be and still be considered nearly the same color is determined by the amount of compression you choose ex.

RAW files are the largest of all. When you change the settings on your camera for things like sharpness, saturation or even the ISO setting you're telling the camera to change the image after it's captured - kind of like a mini version of Photoshop right inside your camera.

In RAW mode the original unmodified image data is saved along with all the instructions you gave the camera through its settings. When you read a RAW file into Photoshop all those camera settings are applied to the image to make it look just as it did on your camera's LCD screen. The power of RAW mode is you can change those camera settings in your computer after the image is captured.

A year later you can decide the image might have looked better if you'd used a different white balance setting and voila you can do it! That means you'll be able to get fewer files on your memory card and fewer files on your hard drive.

The size of RAW files will vary from camera to camera. As you can see, the more compression you apply, the smaller the file becomes, and there appears to be a point of diminishing returns. Look at the shirt color and the dark areas of his shirt.

In the bottom image you can see jagged lines and blocks of color starting to appear. Just what happens to an image when we apply too much compression? The resulting image tends to block up with digital artifacts that are called "jaggies". This is especially evident in the comparison of the two photos below. Take a hard look at the edges and detail, and you'll see what I mean.

You may also see visible bands of color in continuous tone areas such as blue skies. Those are the extremes. But with certain images you may see a loss of subtle tonal detail in shadow areas and in those same continuous tone areas. So how much compression is just enough? That depends on what you're doing with the image. That will give you every bit of information the camera captured to put into your print.

It is certainly the case that two different cameras can produce the same size of image but with very different overall technical quality. The word resolution means the ability to see or resolve fine detail in a printed photograph. A high resolution image will have a lot more visible detail than a low resolution image.

The image size setting on your camera may even be called resolution because they are so directly related. A large image means high resolution and a small image means low resolution. Please note that this ability to resolve fine detail only applies when you print your digital photograph and not when you are viewing it on a computer monitor.

When you zoom out to see the whole picture then the resolution of the image you see will be that of the screen itself, it physically cannot be any higher than that. You can prove this for yourself by simply comparing a high and low resolution image side by side on your computer.

As long as they are visibly the same size on screen, they will have the same resolution. No matter how close you get to the screen, you will not see any more detail in the larger, high resolution picture. Another thing you can do with a large image is to print or view only a small part of it. So, if you think you might want to do this at any time then you should set your image size or resolution to its maximum.

The size of a digital image is measured in megapixels, which simply means one million pixels. A pixel is the smallest part of a digital image and is a single colour.

If you zoom in close enough to any digital image, you can see the individual pixels that it is made of, all neatly lined up in rows and columns. You might have noticed that, so far, I have not made any mention of the actual numbers involved. How many megabytes do you need to make a large print? This page attempts to answer these questions.

Image file size formula:. Each calculated file size is the uncompressed size. When discussing the quality of digital files based on file size, comparisons should only be made based on uncompressed sizes. To give you some reference, an average drop of rain contains hundreds of thousands of picoliters! To summarize, a higher DPI printer places more ink droplets per pixel and results in the most accurate color rendition and detail.

PPI pixels per inch This is the number of pixels per inch in your image. All that the PPI number will affect is the quality and maximum printable size. If there are too few pixels per inch, then the pixels will be very large and you will get a very pixelated image jagged edges. Therefore, you need at least a 7. That said, this "rule" is not written in stone. Since we view larger prints 20" x 30" or larger from a further distance than you would a small print, you can get away with a lower PPI and still have the image quality look good to the eye.

The larger your desired print size, the lower the PPI necessary for good quality. Large images printed at ppi will still have good quality when viewed from a foot or more away. What can you do to increase the printable size of a photo? Interpolation is the process where your imaging software PhotoShop, etc artificially adds pixels to your file to increase resolution. It accomplishes this by "resampling" the original pixels and creating similar pixels.

By doing this, your file size MB will definitely get larger but will not necessarily make your image look better at a larger size. Although resizing and resampling is possible in software like PhotoShop, we use more advanced software designed for this one particular purpose that produces a much better result. Unless one is attempting an extreme jump in size, it is better to simply print at a reduced PPI to get to a larger image.

MB Megabytes. The term megabyte MB refers to a unit of measurement which describes the size of a digital file. One megabyte is comprised of 1,, bytes, or 1, kilobytes of digital information. When a picture is captured on a digital camera the resulting file must be stored on the camera's memory. Depending on the resolution of the captured image, and the file format being used JPEG , an image will take up a certain number of megabytes of memory.

For example, an 8" x 10" image size at PPI will take up about 35MB of memory space unless compressed.