20D and blowups

[OceanRider]

How big can one expect to get a 20D Large Fine j-peg file to blow holding an excellent rating? Any ideas? The pixels in the 20D at large fine are 3504 x 2336.

[Scottes]

It depends on how close you want to get and how much work you want to do to it (Photoshop, etc).

16x20 will come out excellent with minimum work. I've done 20x30 on a 10D image but it took hours of processing and you can't get much closer than 5 feet.

[Jesper]

That depends on what you think is an "excellent rating", i.e. it's highly subjective.

[tim]

I got a 300D RAW image blown up to 32 * 23 or so. At less than a meter it looks ok but not perfect, at one meter away or more it looks fantastic :)

[OceanRider]

so weve still got some distance to go in digital. I have read that 25 mega pixels is roughly the equivlent to film.

[Scottes]

I have read that 25 mega pixels is roughly the equivlent to film.

And I've read that 9 megapixels is roughly equivalent to 35mm film. But that's a topic that generally turns into an argument. :-)

[aam1234]

Two topics lead to arguments and you won't get an answer to. Jpeg vs. RAW and how many MP's are film equivalent. Sort of like religion and politics of the digital age :D

[Mike Panic]

it depends on how good the initial shot is and who the printer is. i work at a lab, we do wide format stuff daily... and ive seen 40x60 prints come off various 6mp digital camera's, 300d, 10d, d70, etc and all look great, granted you can't look at them closer then 5' - but why would you be that close anyway?

ive also seen prints done from negatives 40x60 - and its a coin toss as to which is digital and which is film... neither look stunning when viewed within arms reach, but both look good when viewed at proper viewing distance

[Nabil-A]

My 2cents,

My recent 36x24" off a g6 raw portrait style photo came out looking amazing.

[Olegis]

The maximum size I ever printed was 50x70cm (19.6x27.5 inches). I shot the picture with my 10D and the Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 at ISO 400, f/6.3, 1/3200, Large/Fine JPEG. Then I ran the picture through the Noise Ninja noise removal tool and upsized it in Photoshop (using 10% increment-steps every time until it reached the final resolution sutable for printing in the lab). The final stage was to perform USM, which took quite a long time with such a large file (at that time it was about 100MB TIFF). The final picture looked incredible, I framed it and gave it to my parents as a birthday gift :)

This is the picture, BTW :

http://www.pbase.com/olegis/image/33200237/medium.jpg


I guess that the 20D is capable of even larger prints, one just has to upsize and process them very carefully.

[chris.bailey]

I have just had some 1dMkII images printed at 6ft x 5ft (enlarged using Pixel Smartscale) and they look fantastic. A little oversharpened by me after the re-size but I will know next time, given the cost of having them made, I'm not about to go and have them re-done. Visitors to my office ask how it was done and cant believe they came from a digital camera. Within practical limits therefore I would suggest that as long as your workflow is good, there are no limits.