Purdie Gallery Custom Printing - big prints from phones

Posted by david purdie on Jun 23, 2023

customer photo iphone 11 pro

A recent client of my custom printing service has kindly agreed to let me use his pictures to talk a bit about the process. It has been something of a revelation!

CASE STUDY - PHONE PICTURES AS BIG PRINTS

All these were shot on phones, from an iphone 7 up to an iphone 13 pro. So good quality for a phone, but by no means top end cameras. They were also saved in the phone's highly compressed jpeg format. On top of this modern phones will process the hell out of your picture to make it as bold, sharp and snappy as possible on the small phone screen. How it will work as a large print is not a priority for Apple, Samsung and co.

Conventional photographic wisdom says that these factors will degrade the image so much that you will struggle to get a good big print from them. Turns out this is not entirely true.

As I worked on these files, I realised that normally when I am doing all the subtle adjustents I do as part of my post-production and printing, I am doing this with a RAW file from a high end camera. I simply haven't tried to do the same with much lower quality files from phones. However, with careful work, phone photos can look very good indeed printed big. They may be lacking the fine detail of big-camera shots, but from normal viewing distances, it really won't matter.

A big camera will always cope better with low light, or very bright highlights. But if you select the right picture you will be amazed at how good a print can be coaxed from a much more basic camera.

Give us a call or email if you are interested in using the custom printing service.