I use a 12X digital camera on Hi-Res. When I use max zoom & crop an item it enlarges it and blurs it. Why?

Question

If I take a picture of birds in the back yard, 25 feet away, on max zoom, then crop a pic. of one bird, it enlarges the pic, but it's blurry even though the first picture appeared clear. Does this happen with all digital cameras? Mine is a 12X Optical Zoom.

Here's a link to one of my pictures, before cropping. I tried to crop the bird, but it's blurred. My camera is 6 meg. and it does have a stabilizer. http://members.aol.com/bidwiser1/finches44.jpg

Answer 1

Even at 12x zoom, the bird probably only occupies a tiny portion of the entire picture. That's only a few hundred pixels. If you blow those up to fill your entire screen, it's only natural that details become fuzzy.
If you want, I can take a look at your picture on my computer - I have some Photoshop experience and I'm sure I can get the most out of your picture (to either confirm or refute my initial suspicion).
If the picture is on-line, send a link. You can add a link as 'additional details' to your question or you can contact me directly by email (you have that option when you click on my profile.
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The rectangular crop of the bird is only 178 x 215 pixels. This is 38,270 pixels. So my first guess that the crop would be just a few hundred pixels was way off.
Still, 38,270 pixels out of 5,947,392 pixels total is only 0.6% of the total image.
If you were to print that tiny cropped portion at 300 dpi (the standard for glossy magazine quality) you'd end up with a print measuring just 0.6 x 0.7 inches.
I'll stand by my initial response - you need to get closer!

Answer 2

I would be very curious to know what camera this was. I have a Fuji S9500, which produces a similar effect to this.

You will notice that the camera actually focussed better on the little feeder which is slightly closer to the camera. When presented with a scene like this and left in Auto Focus Area mode the camera will strain to focus on the closest object. One thing that will help is to put the camera in "Spot Focus" mode. But don't forget that you have done this, because the camera will always focus on the center of the frame whether you want it to or not.

Another thing is that your scene is backlit, or in other words sunlight coming slightly towards the camera.

Another issue is that you have a window straight behind the object you were focusing on.

But more that all of the above, your image has a little fringe all around the edges of the detail. At first look, this appears to be blur, but it is more than that, and this is the exact same fault my Fuji S9500 shows. Assuming this image has not been cropped your camera is 6MP, which do not usually suffer from this problem. The exif information has been stripped from the image so I cannot tell more about the shooting conditions and what the camera was thinking.

You're welcome to message me if you wish to discuss this more, you have me curious.

Answer 3

Are you cropping it within the camera, or using external software? There's no reason why stand-alone software should be enlarging your photo when you crop it. But yeah, enlarging a digital photo is pretty much the same thing as using digital zoom to begin with. It takes a small number of pixels and rescales them to display over a much larger number of pixels, often resulting in a really grainy image. Never use anything but optical zoom, and always try to frame the shot as close as you can to what you'd want as a final cropped image. That's the best advice I can give you, without suggesting that you invest in some really expensive photo-editing software and learn how to pull every last trick to cheat the resolution of your final image.

Answer 4

If the camera does not have an image stabiliser that is the reason.
You cannot crop the picture over half of its size and be safe.

Answer 5

It also depends on how many megs your camera is ie. 4,6,8 etc.