What resolution do you need to reproduce a painting?

Print size in inches equals pixel dimension divided by DPI. Fine-art printing is conventionally done at 300 DPI, so a file 14,204 × 10,652 pixels prints at about 47.35 × 35.51 inches with no interpolation at all — every printed dot backed by a captured pixel.

Run it backwards to size a capture: multiply the largest print you want by 300, and that is the pixel dimension you need. A 40-inch print wants 12,000 pixels on that edge. A 20-inch print wants 6,000.

300 DPI approximates what a person resolves at reading distance. A canvas viewed from ten feet across a room does not need the same density as a plate in a book held at fourteen inches, which is why large-format printers routinely work at lower effective resolutions without anyone noticing.

This is why a maximum print size cannot be quoted honestly without knowing the print process and the viewing distance. Anyone who gives you a single number for it is quoting a convention, not measuring your situation.

Interpolation invents pixels between the ones you captured. Modern algorithms, machine-learning ones included, are impressively good at guessing plausible detail — but plausible is doing a lot of work in that sentence. What comes back is the software's idea of what your brushwork might have looked like.

For a reproduction sold as a reproduction of your work, that distinction matters. Capture at the resolution the largest intended print needs, and downscale for everything smaller. Downscaling discards information cleanly; upscaling fabricates it.

A small work photographed at full frame uses the whole sensor on a small area, so effective detail per inch of original is very high. A mural-sized piece spreads the same sensor across far more surface, and the detail per inch drops accordingly.

This is the point at which single-frame capture stops being the answer and the work is photographed in overlapping sections and stitched into one master — which lifts the ceiling well past what one frame holds, at the cost of more capture time.