How to Set Up Your Point-and-Shoot Digital Camera, Volume 1: Resolution

For the past few years my mother has made the same request of me for a Christmas gift: a 52 week desk photo calendar with family photos.  She truly cherishes and uses this book all year as both a master calendar and a brag-book, so I'm always happy to create one for her.  This is a big project as it requires 54 pages of photos, and being who I am, I like to make sure each photo has some relation to the week that it appears on.  Since myself, my husband and my children are the only ones in my family who live in Nevada, I am not always there to capture important moments during the year of the other siblings and their families myself, so I make the annual request for high-res (printable) photos to be emailed to me for use in the calendar.  I kept running into the same problems with the photos that were sent to me, they were not print-quality resolution.  In trying to get to the bottom of this I talked to my sister, because I was sure that she was somehow unknowingly compressing the files when she was emailing them to me, so I told her I would just get them off her computer the next time I came to Southern California.

Turns out she was not compressing the files, she had been sending me the highest resolution images she had.  The problem turned out to be the camera setup.  Her camera was set to maximize the number of photos that the camera's memory card could hold.  I then remembered that I had helped a number of people over the years set-up their digital cameras to take better pictures.  I was surprised how many people never read their owners manuals.  My husband assures me that this is not unusual, that in fact I am the weirdo who enjoys reading manuals cover to cover to find out every feature of my electronic stuff.  So, I thought that maybe if I break the most important features of digital point-and-shoots down for you, you'll be able to adjust your settings even if you never crack that manual open, and help you get the most out of your camera.  This is the first in the series of articles on this topic, so be sure to subscribe to my blog if you want to be sure not to miss one.

Setting Your Camera's Resolution
First of all, what is resolution and why is it important?  No, we're not talking about your promise to yourself to lose weight and get to the gym 5 times per week that you just made and have already broken; I'm referring to how clear a photo image looks.  Let's look at two different resolution settings of the same image so you can see what I mean:

The bottom of the 2 images is lower-resolution and we would probably say that it looks too "pixelated" or in photographers lingo would say "it has a bad case of the jaggies."  Feel free to throw that phrase around to impress your friends.  (If that actually works, by the way, be sure let me know)

In digital photography the widely used convention of expressing resolution is megapixels.  This is only partially true, but if you are not the type to cuddle up with a manual, I'm sure that you don't want me to launch into an explanation of demosaicing algorithms in your camera's processor which use interpolation to reconstruct a color image from the incomplete color samples that your camera's image sensor puts out.  Did your eyes start to glaze over just now?  Yea, that's what I thought.  So for the hard-core techies out there, this article is not for you.  Go read your manual.  For the rest of you normal people, we're going to say that the number of megapixels your camera is set to produce per image is the greatest factor in determining your image resolution.

Chances are whether you really knew what is meant or not, the number of megapixels the camera is capable of producing per image was probably one of the factors you looked at when choosing your camera, but a 10mp camera will only output 10mp images if you set it at the maximum setting.  I often hear from people that they selected a low resolution setting because they wanted to get more images on their memory card, and they didn't understand the effect it had on image quality.  If your memory card promises 1000 images on it and didn't cost at least a hundred dollars, it probably will only hold that many if you have your camera set to a pretty low-resolution setting.  If you are only planning on using your photos to create a Facebook photo album, that resolution will look just fine.  If you are like most of us, yes, you want to create the Facebook album, but you also want the ability now, or down the road when you are promising yourself you will finally have the time to scrapbook, to make nice prints from your photos.  Prints require vastly higher resolution.  Why limit yourself?  What if you end up taking a photo that you absolutely love (and if you subscribe to my blog and religiously read all my posts this is likely to happen) and you want to blow it up to an large print and frame it to hang on your wall?  Yes, choosing a maximum resolution setting will take up more room on your memory card per photo, but I suggest you just buy more memory cards and be sure to upload, and back up your photos more frequently, like EVERY time you take pictures, and then erase and format your memory card so that you have blank cards ready to go at all times.  If you are going on vacation, buy more memory cards to take.  On any given photo shoot I take at least 10 cards with me, and many of mine are the very expensive ones that hold 500 photos at very high resolution.  Why? See my last blog post about taking more pictures.

So how do you check the resolution setting on your camera and make sure it is set to the maximum resolution possible?  Of course every camera is different, but I have found that most every digital camera has a "menu" or "func" (short for function or function set) button.  In order to get into your camera's settings, you may have to change the mode that it is in, make sure it isn't in video mode for starters, and your camera may need to be in shooting mode rather than playback mode in order to have the resolution setting option available depending on the make and model.  Then you'll look for a "preference" or "settings" in the menu to select.  Next you'll look for an option such as "quality," "image size," "resolution," or something along those lines.  Once there, you'll then see your options for setting image quality.  These can be confusing.  Often they are expressed with only letters:  "L", "M" (sometimes further broken down into M1 and M2) and "S" which, not surprisingly, stand for large, medium and small, so choose the "L," in that case.  Sometimes they throw a "Max" in there as well, which makes it easier actually; just choose "Max."  Some models express quality in terms of "economy," "fine," "super-fine," in which case you should select, you guessed it, "super-fine."  Sometimes quality settings are expressed in usage terms such as: "email," or "web,", "4x6 print," "8x10 print," "11x17 print."  I highly recommend that you select the largest print size possible.  You may never intend to print anything at "11x17" or "20x24"  size, but consider this: what if you love how your daughter looks in a photo, but Aunt Maude in the background is making a weird face?  Cropping could save that photo, but if your resolution isn't high enough that won't work, unless you want to print a 1"x1.5" photo.  You can always reduce image and file sizes after the fact, but you can't increase it.  Well, not much, and not without special software, which still won't save a photo with a bad case of the jaggies (see how I just threw that in there?).

If your camera is advanced enough to have a quality setting labeled "RAW" then I suggest you consider learning to use that setting.  RAW is not an acronym, it means "raw," as in "raw data."  When you select "RAW" you are choosing to have your camera capture the image, but not to process the image.  Remember I mentioned the demosaicing algorithms earlier?  Wait, stay with me, I promise not to get all technical here.  You can store more of the data on your memory card and after you upload it to your computer you need to use either the software that came with your camera, or another processing software like Apple Aperture, or I use Adobe Lightroom, which allows you to make the processing choices for your photo and can save many photos that are under or overexposed for instance (within limits of course).  If you are not someone who enjoys editing your photos afterward, then RAW is not for you.  The other thing to consider when selecting RAW shooting vs jpeg is how fast you need to be able to shoot.  If you are in a situation where you need to be able to shoot photos in a row rather quickly to capture something that is happening fast, that might be a case to switch to the highest jpeg setting possible as it takes cameras longer to write RAW files to your memory card.

I hope that you found this information helpful.  I look forward to your feedback on this topic, and would love to know if there is anything you would like to know more about to help you take better pictures.

Happy New Year!
Kelly Stampe Gaez
KSG Photography