OK, everything I know about photography could be written on the back of, well, a very, very, small photo, but from lurking around here it would seem that I may well be in the minority so I seek your collective wisdom.

I purchased a high definition photo of myself hitting the water splash at the CRC Selkirk marathon which I currently have set as my laptop wallpaper but I’m beginning to find that this is insufficient to satisfy my narcissistic tendencies. Therefore, I’m looking into having a large photo/poster of the image printed but I’m unsure whether the image quality will suffer. The image is 4288 by 2848 pixels; what’s the largest print I can get away with before the image of my beautiful self deteriorates?

@300 dpi – 363.05 x 241.13mm, magazine quality

@200dpi – 544.58 x 361.7mm, which will be passable..

After that you are stretching. Tbh it really depends how far away from the image you are viewing, further away you’ll get away with more. And how sensitive to image quality you are, but you could get a decent print out of it at a much higher size, quite easily..Although i’m not sure how good a life sized image of yourself will look in your living room! 😀 Might be a tiny wee bit too far!

Thanks. I intend to view the image from licking distance so will play it safe 😆

You can get that blown up pretty large, I reckon.
Years ago I wanted to see how big I could get an image blown up before it started looking rubbish. I had a 16×20″ enlargement done by Photobox from a 4Mp camera (way less pixels than you quote) and it came out really well.

The printing system will have some kind of smoothing applied if you print something larger than you ‘should’ do.

Have a word with the printer, they’ll tell you.

lol at licking distance!

That’s a decent file size. If you have a mate who owns a copy of photoshop, it can be upsized to 20×16″ no bother.

If you get it printed on canvas you could easily get away with a three foot print (if your super-ego can handle it).