I'd be interested to know why those particular sizes are shown. I once tried to work out if they were significant, and failed.

I know this is not the place for a feature request, but I'd like to see a custom resampling size/ratio in the Workflow Options, instead of the presets, which seem too arbitrary to me.

On a related note, I seem to remember that there's a trick you can perform with ACR's crop tool to resample the image too, but I don't know if this works any differently.

station_two wrote:

 

Capturing an image at the target size has been and always will be the ideal to pursue, in my view.  This holds true for scanning film as well as for digital cameras.

Capturing the image at a desired target size is ideal when one unequivocally knows that target size at time of shooting.  But there are situations where this cannot be known.  I'll  photo a theatre rehearsal where the immediate need is for web, social media and send-out-to-press-size images.  Then, sometimes much later, I'll get a request "can you crop out of a small part of the scene? we want to cut it into a brochure," or for a very high res file to go for a poster or other large print.  Never know ahead of time.  In anticipation of these I capture largest size from camera even though it may be called for in only a small fraction of the images; then, using acr-edited raw file as a master file, derive other image formats and sizes as needed over time.

Note that I started my post by typing; 

Capturing an image at the target size has been and always will be the ideal to pursue, in my view.  This holds true for scanning film as well as for digital cameras.

Yes, of course that implies knowing exactly what the target output is.  Duh!

Within the Context of PEC's post, the goal would be to eliminate the need to downsample for web—or to resample at all.

I say, by all means take advantage of the camera's ability to capture different pixel dimensions natively.

Downsampling will degrade an image far more than upsampling.  That's just a fact of life.

Ideally, I shouldn't have to resample at all, but in a pinch, if forced to choose the lesser of two evils at gunpoint, I'd opt for upsampling, reluctantly.

Eric,

To be absolutely clear, you are recommending to downsample in Ps rather than ACR : is that correct?

Perhaps you should print your 4 x 6 at 600 ppi, Pierre.  It won't look much different, but maybe subtly better.  I saw definite differences (with a jeweler's loupe) between 300 ppi and 600 ppi inkjet prints with a 1200 x 2400 dpi printer.

-Noel

A general philosophy I've always followed, and so far it's not done me wrong is this:

Don't skimp on the computing resources.

If your computer had no problem storing as many raw files at full resolution as you could possibly ever shoot, and would process them just as quickly as if they were smaller (i.e., fast enough to keep up with you), would there be any question?

The pertinent considerations seem to be:

• You can store 50,000 40 megabyte raw files in a 2 terabyte hard drive, which costs under $100 today and shows no signs of getting more expensive tomorrow.
• Modern multi-core computers and GPUs can whip through processing a 36 megapixel file in just seconds.  I don't think next year's model will be slower.
• One day you might want to make even more out of the images you've already captured.
• Raw converters keep getting better and better.

Only you can weigh the tradeoffs.

-Noel