Some thoughts on resolution
Your camera likely boasts somewhere between 20 and 100 megapixels of resolution. The device you see your photos on shows most likely well less than 2 megapixels, Even the fanciest monitors don’t have much more than 4 megapixels.
So where does all the detail in your photos go?
I have been reprocessing some of my street photography for a series running over on Ludwig.Gallery. One of the photos is of a youngster in a stroller. I noticed some strong reflections in the eyes, so I zoomed in. Oh, yes, there is so much more detail in photos than you see on a screen!
When you resize for showing on your blog or in social media more than 90 percent of the pixels are tossed. Even strong cropping will have more pixels than you need.
We have all chuckled when a spy thriller scene gets amazing forensic details out of average photos. But actually, that is not as unrealistic as it seems. Look at these images – the whole frame – reduced in size, i.e. resolution, so you can see it here, and a tiny section.
See, you can make out the doting parent and that other figure is yours truly.
There was some enhancement done on this close-up using Topaz Labs Gigapixel AI. It nicely sharpened the eyelashes and fine detail, but the content of the picture really was there in the original frame.
Not all photos have fine detail worthy of zooming in on. A tiny bit of camera shake can obscure such detail. So can a bit of focus error. There are optical limits, at small apertures, high f-numbers, the diffraction limits are easily exceeded, and the image will be “soft”.
I like to check the focus point in my photos using Nikon NX Studio. For portraits you are supposed to focus on the closer eye. I missed as you can see in this screen capture – see the red rectangle below the nose.
If your photos lack sharpness, it is not very likely that you have a sensor resolution problem. We all are tossing most of what our cameras produce. But that is alright. Photos are not about resolution but about the content, the stories they tell.
.:. © 2022 Ludwig Keck
Interesting stuff. Aren’t modern cameras amazing?
Thank you, Margaret. Yes, they sure are!
Thanks for this detailed explanation, Ludwig. While I appreciated the explanation, I do not have any sophisticated photo editing software, so am unlikely to ever replicate a closeup such as shown here. You did have a quite adorable photo subject and photos should be about the stories they tell, I agree.
Thank you, Beatrice. We agree that photos tell a story about the subject – and the photographer! If you are satisfied with the way your photos turn out, you don’t need anything fancy. Keep shooting and sharing. Btw, why is your site private?