Format for HD projection

<p>In preparing images for projecting with an HD projector does matter whether they are jpgs, tiffs or can you just

leave them in the nikon format?</p>

<p>The projector is just a display device. What will you be using to feed the signal to the projector? Will you be connecting it to a DVD player? To a laptop?<br /><br />Presuming the projector will be connected to a laptop, this comes down to what software you'll be using to display the images. Likely you won't want to use something that has to render output on the fly from an NEF file. A decent quality JPG is going to load faster in most slide-show-oriented pieces of software.<br /><br />Hate to speculate though. Explain more about how the whole system will be working.</p>

<p>I am planning on using a small duo-core desk top with 4 gigs of memory and an hdmi connection, so this should be fast enough to render anything in the time needed and there shouldn't be any caching problems. What I am wondering is whether you can see the difference between the jpgs and tiffs. I am planning on leaving the images full-size which in the case of the D300 is about 3600 pixels wide and the D700 4200 pixels wide. </p>

<p>Your computer may be fast enough to redraw full-sized images in a flash (I doubt it). but you still have to accommodate the formatting imposed by the software and hardware.</p>

<p>I recommend that you resize the images for projection to fit the pixel size of the projector. If this is a 16:9 projector (you did say HD), avoid vertical shots, since they will look a lot smaller than horizontal shots sized to fit that format. Most projectors have a 4:3 aspect ratio, which has the same problem but to a lesser degree.</p>

<p>The appropriate size of the image also depends on the presentation software. If you use PowerPoint, for example, "slides" have frames and captions which take away from the area allowed for the image. Size the image to fit the available area in this case, rather than the maximum size of the projected image.</p>

<p>It usually takes a significant amount of time for the computer to resample and map an high resolution image to the output format. Just as important, it may draw the screen from top to bottom rather than all at once. Either way, you lose the ability to control the transitions, which is an important part of an effective presentation. JPEGS are smaller than TIFF files with the same resolution, consequently take less time to load from a disc or hard drive. That's especially important if your presentation is on a DVD. You can't always use your own computer at a presentation.</p>

<p>Also: if you actually prepare the images in the real resolution at which they'll be projected, you are in complete control over the visual quality of the output. If the slide show software will have to shoe-horn the images down to a given resolution on the fly, it's almost certain that it won't do as good a job of it on the fly as you will when you're more deliberate about it, and create files with exactly the same number of pixels (high, and wide) as the display software and projector hardware are going to actually use.</p>

<p>I've been to many presentations where individuals had "drag-and-dropped" full-res images onto a PowerPoint slide, and gave the presentation on a public laptop presenter PC. The experience can be painfully slow.</p>

<p>Downsize all your images to the maximum vertical resolution (not horizontal). This is probably 1620x1080 pixels. A wide-screen projector is too wide for photography, and you will be limited by the height. A full-screen projector is too tall for 35mm slides (3:2 aspect), so this would leave you resizing only slightly to match the width, be it 1600 or 1024 pixels.</p>

<p>Definitely settle on .JPG format. Being the most universal, JPG's will render fastest. Any loss in quality will be a moot point compared to the inherently terrible display format of digital projectors.</p>

<p>The easy way to make everything fit is to use Bridge/Image Processor (or Lightroom) and resize to fit a box with the projection dimensions in pixels. That way both horizontal and vertical shots will fit the screen without cropping.</p>

<p>Thanks for all your help. Since these are about half bird photos most of the images will be cropped. The new projector should show up in a few days and based on what I have heard so far, it looks like there is no reason to not stick with jgps, which is what I have done in the past. </p>

<p>Whenever I do a presentation just to look at the images I find out what the aspect ratio is and the resolution of the projector/screen. In my case the screen is a 16:9 ratio with resolution of 1920 x 1080. I edit the images to match as best as I can and put them in a separate file saved as jpgs at the best quality.</p>

<p>If you want to demonstrate how to edit images and need the higher resolution to zoom in etc. then make a file copy of your images at whatever resolution the camera provides and work with these on the pc that is connected to the projector.</p>

<p>I am going to use Photoshop Bridge on the laptop that I plan to use for the presentation which has an hdmi connection, as does the projector. Bridge has a complete set of thumbnails for those I intend to project. Why would I go to the trouble of making jpgs when the NEF images will project at the maximum resolution? With my old projector, I can flip through the images as fast as I want, just like they would if they were on the computer monitor, so I would assume that would be the case with the new projector as well? </p>