100% crop -- Do I loose detail and etc..?

[jimchapin468]

If I take a picture with my Canon 20D 8 Megal Pixel camera set on large and highest detail setting do I loose sharpness, detail, contrast, etc.. when I do a 100% crop and then print the picture? Thanks so much for your your reply .. Jimmy

[Miika]

The term "100% crop" is usually used for web display of a little detail of an image, ie. actual pixels of a small portion of the original image.

If you print this area, let's say a square of 200x200 pixels, you get the little detail on paper if you do not enlarge it - you have just cropped out rest of the image.

If you want to enlarge (upsample) a portion of an image, the photo editing program does the counting, and the result will in most cases look ok up to 2x. (200x200 would become 400x400). You can do this also with the crop tool of Photoshop - you can preset the target size and resolution - you can even have fixed proportion, select an area of an image and have the area enlarged.

Enlarged digital picture rarely looks as good as the original. It is very difficult to give exact instructions what will look bad or good and what you loose. You need to experiment with different settings.

Printing is also about enlarging and cropping (=fitting the image on paper), you can adjust the settings yourself, or you can let the printer driver and software do it for you.

Another aspect to this is how the image data fits to the resolution of printer and how the ink spreads around. Even a halftone four-color or bw image (eg. newspaper or book) can look sharp and have a good contrast.

Miika