Digital BW, The Print

Clayton,

Your results are not necessarily much different to mine. The kind of 
thing you did corresponds more to the upsizing in the second part of my 
feature where I basically found very little difference between any of 
the programs and methods for a fairly moderate upsizing. I don't think I 
could tell the prints apart if I evened out the contrast, although on 
screen there were slight differences, though PS7 bicubic was definitely 
not quite up with the others (I don't have CS.) On screen I'm working at 
100 pixels per inch, while I printed at 300.

My experience over quite a while tells me there are few problems in 
upsizing from 17Mb to 50Mb with almost any software and I think I say 
that in the feature. These files have gone off to some quite picky 
people who have always been happy with the quality. Usually I've used 
Qimage.

Where I did find a difference was in the extreme upsizing. I actually 
took a 0.25Mp image and produced a roughly 17 Mp image. It was certainly 
a much larger amount than SizeFixer claimed to work but I chose to do 
this because I thought it would exaggerate the differences between the 
various methods and also because I was interested to see what I could do 
with a web image. Slightly more than I expected, but not a quality print!

With the extreme case I've just tried the PS7 bicubic with upsizing to 
20% beyond taget, then down and it doesn't make any difference with that.

Regards

Peter Marshall
petermarshall@...     
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and elsewhere......



Clayton Jones wrote:

>>Peter said: You might find it worth downloading the trial version 
>>of Photozoom Pro in that case as it seems almost as good. But if 
>>you already have QImage its probably not worth bothering.
>>    
>>
>
>I just downloaded and tried the Photozoom demo. Results are below in
>the list.  Here's what I'm doing and what I've tried so far.
>
>The Challenge: upsize some 1.2 mp JPGs that were shot with a Casio
>Z-50, a pocket sized 5mp digicam.  Upsize to 8mp.
>
>What I've tried:
>
>1) PS-CS/bicubic - surprisingly good results, way beyond my
>expectations.  Everything else is compared to this.
>
>2) PS-CS/bicubic Smooth - not bad but compared to 1) is too soft to
>recover w/ more USM.
>
>3) PS-CS/bicubic Sharper - increased contrast too much & compressed
>shadows, plus halos.
>
>4) Qimage/Pyramid Print-To-file, at various sharpen settings - lots of
>patterned atrifacts and halos.  Not even close to 1). 
>
>5) Qimage/most other algorithms - various degrees of artifacts and
>halos.  Nothing anywhere near 1) above.
>
>6) SizeFixer (someone did it for me) at normal setting (because it
>can't read the Casio exif for advanced mode)- very much like 1), but
>with worse jaggies on diagonals.
>
>7) Photozoom Pro - Ran demo with S-Spline (supposedly the best) at
>default settings.  Result: Terrible.  Looks horribly overprocessed and
>cartoonish.  I didn't try any of the other algorithms.
>
>8) Jack Flesher's PS-CS/bicubic workflow, as described at this link
>(thanks to Carl Schofield for the tip):
>
>  http://www.outbackphoto.com/workflow/wf_60/essay.html
>
>It goes like this:
>a) do all work to get the image ready to print, including sharpening,
> at native resolution
>b) upsize with bicubic smoother to 20% past target resolution
>c) add more sharpening
>d) downsize with bicubic sharper to target resolution
>
>The result was much better than my straight bicubic workflow, in these
>ways:
>- sharper, with fewer sharpening artifacts
>- better shadow separation and low end contrast
>- over all look was sharper & contrastier with better shadow detail
>
>I could not match the results with my normal methods.  My workflow has
>been this:
>- convert to grayscale
>- then upsize with bicubic
>- then do the work
>
>Then I did some experiments, and found that the real difference is in
>doing the work, including sharpening, before upsizing.  When I changed
>my workflow to this:
>- convert to grayscale
>- do the work, including sharpening
>- then upsize with bicubic
>- add a bit more sharpening
>
>...the result was nearly identical to the Flesher workflow.  That
>print was still a tiny bit better.  I did some tests with the workflow
>and the crucial step seems to be in the sharpening added between the
>two resizings.  But it's real easy to add too much and it starts
>looking overprocessed.  Too little and it doesn't look any better than
>the straight bicubic step.  So it's playing right on the edge, looking
>for the sweet spot.
>
>Seems like the really big difference comes from doing all the resizing
>after the work is done, rather than before it.
>
>
>Regards,
>Clayton
>
>
>Info on black and white digital printing at    
>http://www.cjcom.net/digiprnarts.htm
>
>
>
>
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