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How to Determine Which Camera Resolution to Use

A crisp, high-quality photo begins with a high-resolution image. Resolution refers to the number of pixels that an image contains within a given amount of space. A pixel, or picture element, is a tiny unit of color that combines with other pixels to produce an image. Increase the number of pixels in the image you capture, and its quality increases as well. Most modern cameras allow you change their resolution settings. This ability is useful because you may not want to shoot the highest-resolution image possible every time you snap your camera's shutter.

Instructions

- 1
  Learn about image resolution. Your camera may be labeled 5 or 8 Megapixels, for example, but you can̵7;t meaningfully equate those numbers to real-life photographic situations without a basic understanding of them. B&H, a photographic-supply company, provides a useful chart (link in Resources) that shows how image quality varies with resolution. For example, cameras with low resolutions of 320 horizontal pixels by 240 vertical pixels -- a fraction of a Megapixel -- produce poor- to acceptable-quality images. The term "Megapixels" refers to the total number pixels in an image -- the horizontal dimension times the vertical dimension, measured in millions. The B&H chart shows that cameras capable of producing images with 10 Megapixels or more yield excellent to photo-quality images. However, as the number of Megapixels in an image increases, so does its file size.
- 2
  Choose camera resolutions that work with the Web if you plan to display images there. The Internet -- though it's become faster thanks to broadband connections -- still works more efficiently when it doesn't have to transfer as much data between computers. Website owners and developers remember this and attempt to keep image sizes as small as possible. Nikon suggests using your camera's lower resolutions if you only want to post images on the Web or send them to others via email. Images on the Web also appear differently depending on someone̵7;s monitor resolution. You gain nothing by creating high-resolution images for those who cannot view them. Resolutions of 1024x768 are good enough to produce quality images for the Web.
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  Select medium camera resolutions if you really don̵7;t need higher-quality images and prefer smaller image sizes. If you̵7;re shooting dozens of casual photos in a park, for instance, you can do that using medium resolutions knowing that you̵7;ll get good-quality images. OneSlide Photography, for instance, says that a camera set at medium resolution "will produce medium-sized photos that are still quite detailed by not too big in file size."

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