The Pitfalls of Pixel Peeping

Pixel peeping is often used as a derogatory term to described those obsessed with zooming into digital images to scrutinize them on a pixel-by-pixel level. While pixel-peeping can be useful in evaluating lenses, no good can come of it when done as a matter of course.

Back in the days of film, even if you louped your chromes and negatives, you would not be able to get in as close as you can on a computer display. It's simply too easy to zoom in at ridiculous degrees of magnification, and judge an image in a way that it was never meant to be viewed.

Consider these two very different types of images; the close up, and the far shot.

You take a close up, perhaps with a normal or telephoto lens, and you either chimp it or zoom in after you’ve offloaded it into your computer. You’re basically concentrating on the one subject so everything is there. Zooming in ridiculously close doesn’t get you much. So, you’re pretty happy with the shot.

Then you take a wide shot, perhaps with a normal or wide angle lens, and do the same. You start to zoom in and find a point of interest you wish to explore further, so you zoom in even tighter. There are many potential subjects in this image, and you begin to be disappointed that they’re all soft and lack resolution. This is not the camera’s fault, or the lens’ fault. It’s simply the nature of digital photography. Zooming in allows you to discern individual objects, which are much more compelling that surface textures or fine details in a close up. In viewing a print of a wide angle image, we’re much more likely to take it at face value, appreciating the composition and not the multitude of individual subjects it contains.

This phenomenon becomes more apparent with the use of wide-angle lenses, which render distant objects very, very small. The best application of a wide angle lens is to put the viewer smack-dab in the center of the situation. You do this by getting in close, actually putting yourself in the situation, and it’s this intimacy that makes the photo come alive. The viewer is not a distant onlooker, but part of the action.

But, I digress. My main point is, if you get caught up in pixel peeping, you’ll never be happy with your equipment, or your work.

Now if it’s truly your intention to create the kind of image that seems to have infinite resolution, you might want to try a longer lens to create “Gigabit” images.

These are images that are composed of many smaller images stitched together with an application. You may already be familiar with this practice in creating panoramic images, which are a class of Gigabit Images. There is a device designed to facilitate the creation gigabit images, but you can also do it yourself with a tripod, Adobe Photoshop, and patience.

The device in question is the GigaPan Epic robotic camera mount, which installs between the camera and tripod. It quickly positions the camera for each shot so that the frames overlap slightly. Accompanying software then stitches these images together to form a larger image. If your plans don’t include the purchase of a view camera and digital back, this might be a good fix for the pixel-peeping resolution junkie.