How to zoom and crop in Photoshop CS5 without losing quality

[jloc]

Hi!

I was testing out whether using the optical zoom on my camera is better than manually zooming a picture in Photoshop. As a complete newbie, what are the basics on how to zoom and crop and not lose my 4288x2416 resolution?

Thanks in advance,
James.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I'm not much beyond a newbie myself, but I have tried similar experiments.

Can you just zoom way in and look at the details on screen, without actually cropping and re-saving? That's what I have done when trying to see differences.

If you do crop and resave, use a lossless format, not something like jpeg.

Are you talking about differences that would be visible on a typically 20 something inch monitor? Or do you mean if blown up and printed on a 10 foot wide poster?

I'd just make a few test shots using a given zoom setting on the camera and compare that to a non-zoomed version of the same shot zoomed in Photoshop. But any differences you see might not matter depending on monitor, size of print, etc.

Just my random musings.

 

[mickey megabyte]

there's no way to zoom and crop and not lose some detail.

as soon as you apply any sort of digital zoom, be it in software or hardware, then the machine has to start making up pixels, guessing the colours and it's never going to be perfect.

 

[mickey megabyte]

just seen this article

 

[fseal]

Yeah, if you want to zoom in on something knowingly when you are taking the photograph, always use the optical zoom on your camera. It will always be better quality than cropping in photoshop (You will always get your resolution that way). Well unless the zoom lens was just completely terrible or something, but I've never seen a case of that myself.

Frequently though of course you get a photo which you want to crop after the fact or you were at max zoom but you needed a little more for a good composition and in that case there is no choice, you lose some resolution no matter what. So always better to do your best to frame in camera when taking the picture.

Also, never use the digital zoom on the camera if it has one, I always turn that off. That's only if you weren't using any sort of program to process your pictures afterwards, but since you are using Photoshop already, in-camera digital zoom is just not useful at all.