Most of your digital photos are going to be either viewed on your computer screen or printed on relatively small and standard photo paper sizes such as 4 by 6 and 5 by 7 inches. Every now and then however you would like to print bigger digital prints also known as enlargements The digital photos that you take have a certain resolution associated with them. The digital photo resolution is determined at the time the digital photo is taken. Every digital camera supports a certain maximum resolution expressed in the number of mega pixels in a photo. Digital cameras can however be set to use lower resolution usually in order to save on disk space since lower resolution digital photos result in smaller photo files. When printing digital photos on Snapfish or for that matter or any other photo printing service you must make sure that the paper size you are printing on is correct for the resolution of the digital photo that you are printing. If the digital photo resolution is too low for the paper size the result will be a printed photo that is pixelized. Pixelized digital photos prints are prints in which each pixel is big enough for the human eye to see. In other words when looking at the print instead of seeing a smooth photo the viewer can see each individual pixels as the pixels do not blend into each other as they should. What the right resolution for each print is a function of a few factors. One is the paper size another one is the distance from which the paper print will be viewed. Usually the distance from which a paper photo is viewed correlates to its size so many times people quote the paper size as the sole factor for what resolution is needed for a good print. Snapfish allows you to choose from many photo paper sizes and allows you to upload photos for printing in any resolution that you choose. It is really up to you to make sure that the prints you are making are correct for the photos that you upload. So what is the method for determining the needed resolution? Printed resolution is measured in dots per inch or in other words in how many dots or pixels are printed on every inch worth of paper. The dots per inch can be calculated by dividing the total number of pixels in a digital photo by the paper size. So if you print a specific digital photo on few different papers every time you use a bigger paper the dots per inch number goes down and the print quality goes down too. Usually as a rule of thumb 200 dots per inch and up result in a good print while 300 dots and up result in a very good quality print. Here is a table with some pre calculated minimum digital photo resolution needed for good and very good paper prints for different paper sizes: page 4X6 1MP 2MP page 5X7 1.5MP 3MP page 8X10 3MP 7MP page 11X14 6MP 14MP page 16X20 12MP 28MP page 20X30 24MP 54MP
Digital photos are virtual data. In the real physical world digital photos are not different than any other computer digital file. Digital photos are a collection of bits stored on magnetic or other media. Bits are the smallest unit of computer digital data. A bit can have only two values also know are zero or when. Two bits put side by side can have four values. Three bits can have eight values, four sixteen and so on and so on. Using bits computers can represent any number.
Digital photos are a collection of pixels that when put side by side create an illusion of a continuous color photos. The more pixels in a single photo the better the illusion is. Pixels are in essence a tiny area on the photo that has a color and intensity. Each pixel can thus be represented as a series of a few numbers. For example most digital photos use the red green blue system to represent a pixel. By mixing the base colors red green and blue in different proportions every other color can be created.
A pixel is then stored by a computer as three values representing the amount of red the amount of green and the amount of blue for that pixel. Computer screen for example can later on use that information in order to display true physical world colors on a computer screen. So if a pixel can be represented by three numbers a complete digital photo can be represented by the number of pixels in it multiplied by three. In most implementation two hundred fifty six values of each red green and blue are used for sufficiently creating one of sixteen million colors and intensity combination for each pixel. Two hundred fifty six values require eight bits and thus each pixel occupies the storage of twenty four bits.
Digital bits physical representation can be very simple or very complex depending on the digital media used. Many years ago for example paper cards where used to store data. Each card had a tiny area reserved for each bit. If the area had a hole in it the bit had a zero value otherwise it had a one value. Obviously such implementation had many problems just to mention two storage capacity was very limited and data could not be easily erased.
Modern digital media almost always uses magnetic surfaces to represent bits. A magnetic sensitive coating is applied to a disk. A magnetic read write head can then change the magnetic polarity on tiny areas of the disk each polarity representing one bit value of zero or one. Such magnetic storage can achieve very high capacities and can obviously be erased and rewritten many times.
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