Enlarging a photo can transform blurry into beauty, or the other way around.
The resolution of the camera's digital sensor is not the most important factor in the quality of a print. David Pogue of the "New York Times" experimented with 16-by-24-inch prints in 2007 and concluded that "five or six megapixels is plenty." Other factors make a bigger difference.
Depth of Field
A picture taken all at the same focus, such as a distant landscape, will hold up best at poster size. A picture with a face or flower in focus and surroundings blurry might look poorly balanced when it's enlarged.
Initial Composition
A good way to change that balance of depth of field is to crop out large swaths of unfocused imagery. When you crop, though, you diminish the number of pixels you have to spread over that poster-sized print, and the finer points of the focused part can start to look coarse.
Print Resolution
Resolution makes a much bigger difference in printing than it does in capturing the image. A 16-by-24-inch poster printed at 72 dpi (dots of ink per inch, not the same as pixels) can show less than half of your 5 megapixels. Printed at 300 dpi, there's room for nuance within each dot space, and that will make a very visible difference.
Tags: bigger difference