Up sizing an image

[Klickit]

I have a portrait jpeg that's 2592 x 3872. I want to take a small portion of that, say around 10%, and up-size it. I have heard that it is possible to do this in stages, rather than in one hit and that doing it in stages produces a better result. Does anyone have any views on this and also, which sharpening method would it be best to use. Thanks.

[Colin Southern]

Hi Kit,

Specialist programs like Genuine Fractals give the best result, but often just a plain old bicubic smoother is more than adequate. It really comes down to how big you're going to display or print, and what the viewing distance is going to be.

For what it's worth, I've not had a lot of luck with incrementally up-sizing.

If you want to send me the cropped image I'd be happy to take a look at it for you.

[Steaphany]

Kit,

I recommend Qimage and I have their Studio edition. It's described as a photo printing software package but I use it as the final step of PP to create a file that I upload to my print fulfillment service. I've also spoken to others who use Qimage and sucessfully upscaled images for creating 10 foot wide banners.

Paralleling Colin's offer, send me the crop and tell me how large you want it and I'll send you the Qimage result.

[Klickit]

Thanks Colin & Steaphany. I'll try the bicubic smoother and if that isn't satisfactory, I'll send an image to you both.

[Steaphany]

Kit,

Regardless of your efforts, why not allow Colin and me to work our magic so you can evaluate all three techniques side by side ?

[Aloha Steve]

I'm exploring an upsizing software purchase- Qimage, Perfect Resize or other? Please advise.
I am using a 16 mp camera and shoot journalistically so I often need to pull from a portion of the image which significantly reduces the file size. I need a real solid upsizing program to make large scale prints for a museum show.
Thanks in advance!

[Polar01]

Steve if you are wanting to upsize for a museum show, you would enlarge from the raw file not a jpeg file. If you are shooting raw files with a 16mp camera, even a heavy crop should still let you enlarge even with resize image in Photoshop up to 20 x 30 with little problems.

Allan

[Manfred M]

Steve - while I understand where Allan is coming from, his answers has all kinds of built in assumptions.

First of all, the 16MP number by itself is fairly useless by itself. The Nikon Coolpix S800c has a 16MP 1/12.3" sensor while the Nikon D4 also has a 16MP 23.9mm x 36mm sensor. I would say Allan's answer would be fine if your base is the D4, but certainly not the S800c.

The other issue is how much of a crop you are planning to pull. If you are cropping a tiny bit, then I agree with his answer, but if you are cropping just a tiny area of the whole image, no way.

What concerns me is that you have already done some file manipulation and have thrown away some of the data that your camera captured; generally when you reduce file size significantly, which is what you tell us you have already done.

Now, let's look at upsizing software and what it does. It tries to create data where there is none through some form of interpolation. Every supplier tells us about their secret techniques that work so very well; but regardless these techniques use math to create new pixels. I have a copy of Perfect Resize 7.5 as well as Photoshop CC. I tried both on an image that I shot on a tripod mounted Nikon D800, using the pro Nikkor f/2.8 70-200mm, shot at f/7.1 (which is at or near the sweet spot of the the lens) using ISO 100; i.e. darn close to lab conditions.

The results using two pieces of software were virtually identical; I stacked the two images in Photoshop and applied a subtract blending mode and saw the tiniest bit of a difference in some edge definition. Both images were quite soft and rather unusable.

So ultimately, if you have the original RAW images and are not cropping to much, you should be able to create some large size prints, as per Allan's comments. If all you have are highly cropped and compressed jpegs, you may be out of luck. Unfortunately, not even the best software is good at creating something out of nothing.