To start off let me give you a little back round:
Last summer I took a bunch of photos of an old tractor and posted them on several different sites. When I took the photo and did my editing I was using Raw on the camera and I saved the original photo as a PSD file format with a resolution of 300 pixel/inch. Then I also saved it as a JPEG and TIFF format to cover all the bases.
Last night, while going through all the forums I belong to I found a post by a Lady that runs a Design Group that does store layout and design. She asked me to contact her today about her purchasing a One Time Only usage of that tractor photo for a store that she was decorating.
I emailed her today to find out what she needed for size on the photo. She informed me that she needed an Ultra High Resolution Photo of 150 pixel/inch format that she could have printed out. The Print size will be 5' high! WOW!
I had forgotten that I save my photos at the highest resolution I can, so I called Canon USA to find out if my 40D photos could be printed out that large. Canon could not give me a definite answer because they have never done a photo from a 40D that large. I was beside myself, but I was determined to contact some Professional Photographers to find out.
I finally got in touch with the right person! He told me that if I had saved the photo to the highest resolution that I could then by all means I could have the photo printed that Large!
That is when the light bulb (a well used 5 watt light bulb) went off in my head!
I pulled up the original photo in Photoshop and checked out my settings. I found that when I originally saved the photo I had saved it at 300 pixel/inch, so the file size is 16,200 pixels high by 12,165 pixels wide with a pixel dimension of 563.8m. This file is HUGE, and the Print size of of it at the present is 40.55 inches high by 54" wide. So there should be Zero Problem for her printer to enlarge the photo to the 5 foot height!
I tried cropping a section of the photo and then resizing it, then cropping some more and re-cropping it. I went out 7 times before the photo became fuzzy and pixelated!
So, it looks like I may have the photo sold. The First Photo I have sold in 26 years; ever since I got out of doing Weddings and selling wildlife photos!
Please do yourself a Favor and Learn to Shoot and Save RAW Images! Someday it might just pay off for you like it did for me today!
Dick
