Canon 5DMKII shooting 72dpi photos?

I just had a problem with one of my clients because the photos I gave him were at 72 dpi. I had an argument with my client for 10 minutes because I was sure that my Canon 5DMKII shoots jpegs at 300dpi when setting it at large jpeg format.

So the Canon 5DMKII shoots at 72dpi when set to Large JPEG?... omg!!!

If I want 300dpi photos I need to shoot in RAW?

Thanks for the help

No, if you want 300dpi photos, you use something like photoshop and change it from 72dpi to 300dpi.

The overall pixel resolution doesn't change... the output print size will.

jwcdds wrote in post #11189047
No, if you want 300dpi photos, you use something like photoshop and change it from 72dpi to 300dpi.

The overall pixel resolution doesn't change... the output print size will.

Ok but can I have 300dpi photos from the camera?

Dpis are meaningless. Just metadata. They depend on how big you want to print so Canon puts a symbolic number.

What matters is the number of pixels your photo has, divide that for the print size and you have your real dpi/ppi.

In other words, if you want to print at 300dpi you do 5616 pixels/ 300 dpi = 18.72 inches.

It's either you go and re-save the JPG to embed as 300dpi, or the printer can do the work for you. the 5dm2 outputs at a resolution of 5616 x 3744, which translate to a native print size of 18.72" x 12.48 @ 300dpi. you can resize and/or crop to your liking prior to printing.

this why you should also take the responsibility of printing the images for your client. even though the jpg files that your delivered are at 72dpi, the resolution would surely be available for them to print at a high dpi to the size of their liking.

emdzey01 wrote in post #11189144
It's either you go and re-save the JPG to embed as 300dpi, or the printer can do the work for you. the 5dm2 outputs at a resolution of 5616 x 3744, which translate to a native print size of 18.72" x 12.48 @ 300dpi. you can resize and/or crop to your liking prior to printing.

this why you should also take the responsibility of printing the images for your client. even though the jpg files that your delivered are at 72dpi, the resolution would surely be available for them to print at a high dpi to the size of their liking.

Thanks for the info... In this case I can't print the images because it's for a magazine. I just give them the photos in 300dpi.

Soto wrote in post #11189173
Thanks for the info... In this case I can't print the images because it's for a magazine. I just give them the photos in 300dpi.

If they want the photo in 300dpi ask about the print size and then upres the image to the number of pixels you need. Upsizing incrementally (10%) is usually better than doing it in one just step. There are special plugins for upsizing like Genuine Fractals too.

Dots per inch only exist when you are on a physical medium that is measured in inches. A digital photo has no inches, therefore it is impossible to calculate how many dots there are per inch.

For some reason printer people are really confused by this.

The real answer is that your client is incompetent to do their job.

The practical answer is to do a batch conversion of the images to 300dpi using whatever post-processing software you have. Note that this will make no difference at all to the images, not a bit. All that will change will be a number in the file header.

My guess is that when they open your images in Photoshop, they are seeing the useless default number of 72dpi that comes up when resizing images.
This number is totally meaningless and confuses the cr@p out of people who don't know any better.

Just save it at 300dpi.....no big deal. I have to educate clients about this all the time. The last time I had to argue with a graphic artist that insisted that the file size was all that mattered. She HAD TO have 2megs for each shot......and I had to email them. She was printing about 7.5 inches in width. I just figured about 240 X 7.5 = 1800 wide, this gave her roughly about 800-900kb files that printed perfectly. She was like "Oh.....now I get it"....lol

xarqi wrote in post #11189948
The real answer is that your client is incompetent to do their job.

Funny, but accurate.

people are funny when they understand very little about photography. They just know from some other idiot they want 300dpi.

are you by any chance using iphoto to process your files? I know that iphoto outputs them at 72 dpi resolution from what I understand, I dont use it, but a colleague of mine asked me why all of his files from a 1d mk4 were at 72 dpi and he used iphoto.

They come out the camera tagged at 72dpi.