When working with photographic negatives, you could simply have your lab enlarge the image to nearly whatever sized print you’d like for your album. In the digital age, a lot more goes into resizing your digital images. When you enlarge a digital image you are not enlarging the pixels; rather, each pixel must be evaluated and new pixels need to be placed between the existing pixels. You are literally adding information to make the image larger (making a bigger file).
There are limits, however, to how much information you can add to an image and in the end, how large you can make it. Another problem is digital noise. As you enlarge an image, this noise becomes more apparent. One of the things you can do to minimize noise is use noise-reduction software on your images after capture.
Photos by George St. Photo and Video
What does this have to do with making bigger albums? If you like to have panoramic images in your albums, be they large group portraits or background images, you’ll need to ensure that from your camera to your post capture processing system, you optimize each image so that it looks good when enlarged. Understanding the limits of your camera and software will help you size your images correctly for these larger album images. See the chart below for reference.
Also, when designing your albums, design for the largest size we offer in the format of your choice. Even if your client is ordering an 8×8 album from their session, design it at least as a 10×10 or better yet a 12×12. Too many times we’ve had to have photographers redesign their albums because of a last minute request for a larger sized book. Because they designed too small, there was not a way to “enlarge” each page layout without losing image quality. If you’d like to learn more about upsizing your images, check out this series of articles at Digital PhotoPro.
