Printing a photo from a Mavic Air (what dimensions of photo ?)

RonanCork · Nov 7, 2019

Hey Guys,

I've a Mavic Air and am helping out a friend by taking some aerial shots of his house - he wanted to get some printed up and then framed

As you know - as regards the MA camera specs, the "effective pixels" is 12MP.

I know this is maybe a broad question (and likely depends on the quality of the image too) but what would be the largest size that you could reasonably print this out on ? See here for photo sizes if it helps to visualize.

I've never actually printed any of my photos but I'm curious to know. Sorry if this is a "how long is a piece of string" type question

Any help would be great.
Thanks - Ro

crosswired · Nov 7, 2019

Megapixels	Pixel Resolution*	Print Size @ 300ppi
10	3872 x 2592	12.91" x 8.64"
12	4290 x 2800	14.30" x 9.34"
16	4920 x 3264	16.40" x 10.88"

might help

crosswired · Nov 7, 2019

or this one:

12 megapixel	Wide (inches)	Tall (inches)
72 PPI screen	55.6	41.7
144 PPI (Retina)	27.8	20.85
150 PPI photo print	36.7	20
300 PPI professional print	13.3	10

Cmntnzxvi · Nov 7, 2019

Printed 13x19 in Semi Gloss paper with Canon Pixma Pro 100, came out rather sharp and decent

RonanCork · Nov 8, 2019

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the great detail on this.

Also just now saw this link, in it (among other things) it shows how can "upscale" an image. The link is called Lets Enhance.io

Wondering what you guys think - or has anyone used it ? I tried it on my image and it did increase in pixels and file size

Thanks Ro

crosswired · Nov 8, 2019

RonanCork said:
Hey Guys,

Thanks for the great detail on this.

Also just now saw this link, in it (among other things) it shows how can "upscale" an image. The link is called Lets Enhance.io

Wondering what you guys think - or has anyone used it ? I tried it on my image and it did increase in pixels and file size

Thanks Ro

no idea how it works mate...

Dave Maine · Nov 8, 2019

There is no way to generate data where none is present. Upscaling attempts to do this, but to any critical eye, always fails. Folks have been working on this problem since the dawn of digital photography.

crosswired · Nov 8, 2019

Dave Maine said:
There is no way to generate data where none is present. Upscaling attempts to do this, but to any critical eye, always fails. Folks have been working on this problem since the dawn of digital photography.

...was thinking it might using some 'blending' algorithm filling the gaps with blend of pixels on each side..but might be wrong as result might be nothing like original photo

Dave Maine · Nov 8, 2019

That is roughly what it does. It may be ok for non critical viewing, but to a critical eye, the image looks watery with the crisp edges gone.

crosswired · Nov 8, 2019

Dave Maine said:
That is roughly what it does. It may be ok for non critical viewing, but to a critical eye, the image looks watery with the crisp edges gone.

yeah, might work for landscape pics wheres not so much details but not on anything else

PAW · Nov 8, 2019

Sorry for the size of the photos, but I wanted to leave them as much in their original form as possible. Here is a photo of my daughter upsized 4x by using Topaz Gigapixel AI done in AUTO mode with no other intervention on my part.

From my purely amateur perspective, it does a good job of taking those small early digital phone pix and converts them to nice larger photos for printing or on-screen viewing.

anotherlab · Nov 8, 2019

Dave Maine said:
There is no way to generate data where none is present. Upscaling attempts to do this, but to any critical eye, always fails. Folks have been working on this problem since the dawn of digital photography.

The Letsenhance service mentioned by @RonanCork is doing a quite bit more than upscaling. They are using AI with models trained on other images. If you upload an image of buildings in a city, in theory the AI model is going to recognize the objects in the images as buildings and it will know how to increase the apparent resolution without just adding pixels. In this case, it is generating data where none is present. The question is how well it does it.

I took a mediocre image (sun going down over a bridge on the Hudson, taken from a moving train with my phone) and uploaded to Letsenhance and sized it to 4x. To the casual eye, it looked pretty good. If you zoomed in closely, there was some haloing effects on the edges of the bridge, but you would have had to been looking for them. The river did not have any artifacts, like the fuzziness you can get from aggressive interpolation. Your mileage may vary.

TheRock · Nov 8, 2019

It also depends on your printer. Some indigo printers need only 100 DPI at exact size to kick out a decent print. I have a small gallery and have taken 12MB Nikon files to 4 feet x 6 feet using one of those. Ask around and play around but the Mini files should be useable for a normal 11x14 print at 300 DPI with good results I would think (still waiting for mine to ship).