Camera resolution and why it matters

photography

Camera resolution and why it matters

Yes, your resolution matters when it comes to photography! Yet, the biggest confusion about resolution is that people mix up input resolution and output resolution.

Your input resolution is actually the quality that you shoot your image at. For cameras, that means sensor size and pixel count. That’s your input resolution – how much information you’re getting at the time you take an image.

On the other hand, output resolution is the resolution you export your final image to when delivering them to your client. These are two completely separate things!

Input resolution

With your input resolution, you want it to be the highest possible resolution ever, because your output resolution will depend on the purpose of that image.

Essentially, the bigger the camera’s sensor, the more pixels you can fit in, and the bigger those pixels are, the more information there is on each pixel, which means you can capture more light information. Higher the resolution = more information.

When it comes to full frame cameras, there's no crop factor. It’s exactly the same sensor as a 35mm film camera. And that’s usually a size of 36mm by 24mm doesn't sound so big, but in photography, that's actually a big sensor.

Full frame cameras are going to be the biggest possible sensor you can have, excluding medium format cameras, which we won’t get into. This means you’re going to have the most amount of pixels and the biggest pixels available.

Crop sensor cameras are roughly 1/3 or 1/5 of the actual full frame sensor, so you're losing information. This is why full frame cameras are much higher resolution.

So when we're talking about input resolution, we usually talk about it in megapixels, which stands for “millions of pixels.” Each one of those pixels holds information. So of course, the more pixels you have, the more information you have, the higher the resolution.

As I just mentioned, a full frame versus a crop sensor is a third of the difference. This matters in terms of resolution because you're getting a lot less information. But this actually also affects the way your lenses show.

If you're shooting with a 50mm lens on your full frame camera, that's going to look accurate and true to the lens. But if you use that same 50mm lens and put it on a crop sensor, you're losing a third of that frame, which means that 50mm is going to look cropped, and it's going to look like a 75mm lens. That’s why when you're shooting with a crop sensor camera, your lenses aren’t as wide as a full frame camera, it's because you're losing 1/3 of the information.

Input vs. Output resolution

In terms of input and output resolution, a good thing to keep in mind is the RAW vs. JPEG conversation.

A RAW file, as the name indicates, is just raw information. RAW files give you many possibilities. You can shoot an image almost fully under or over exposed and still dial it back to correct exposure. You can change every single aspect from color to white balance, and contrast, etc. RAW files are simply the best kind of input resolution files.

JPEGs are a great image format, for output resolution only! That’s because a JPEG is a closed file, which means that it should be your end resolution, AKA what you give to a client, once you're done editing and adjusting everything. With a JPEG, there's no room for modifying much, because information is very limited with this file type – you don’t have range.

When you're shooting, you always want to shoot RAW, period. I never ever, ever, EVER want to see a professional photographer shooting in JPEG! There is absolutely no reason ever to do that.

I hope this blog post about resolutions makes this photography topic easy to understand!

At the end of the day, it helps to know the difference between full frame and crop sensor cameras, and input vs. output resolutions so you can make the most informed decisions when it comes to your own photography practice.