Digital Camera Basics

Digital Camera Basics

What does dpi mean?
When you hear the term dpi it is referring to how many dots per inch are on an image. When enlarging a picture or printing a photo you want to be at 300 dpi for the best quality. 135 dpi is the absolute smallest you want to go when printing. Otherwise the print begins to look really low quality. When using a picture for web design it is fine to use a photo that is at 72 dpi.

What is Compression?
When you compress a picture you take it from a large file size and shrink it down to a small file size. While you are storing the picture, it takes up less space. Lossy compression attempts to get rid of redundant data. For example, if you take a picture that has a lot of sky in it that is the same color the camera software will take all those pixels and put them together. Instead of remembering them separately the software will remember that one color and how many pixels are that color, than when you open up the file it will spread them back out to their original location. This is how compression works.

What is a Pixel?
Pixels are the number of dots that make up an image. For example, 5 megapixels = 5 million dots. The more megapixels your image has the more detail it will show. If you are looking to print high resolution photos you want to look for a camera that has a higher amount of megapixels.

What is the Best Setting for My Camera?
To get the most detailed photos, you want to set your camera to the biggest image size available and the lowest compression. This will be the setting that gives you the fewest pictures but the highest quality on your memory card. If you are looking to store a lot of pictures on your memory card at once, you will want to set the camera on a smaller image size.