Genuine Fractal Interpolation??

[optical]

Anyone with experience with this program?? I read that it can improve the image size of 18MB image of 10D to 48MB without too much lost of image quality.

[Scottes]

I played with it once. It's an interesting technique, and can make certain photos look great in print. On others, it's not so great and other upsizing techniques will do better.

For instance, I used a similar program, Extensis SmartScale, on a picture of a couple painted turtles. It came out awesome at 4800x7200 printed to 12"x18". The solid lines of the turtles, with distinct color changes, works well with these types of programs. On the other hand, a furry wolf sitting next to some bushes looked like crap - the fractals couldn't handle the details of the fur, and made it look worse.

But pictures with well-defined color bands (like buildings) work well, whereas pics with lots of detail with more subtle color changes (like fur) don't look so great. I would imagine that portraits would also look good.


If you do a search in this forum for the word "upsizing" you should find a few posts with lots of discussions. I posted a couple showing and discussing several upsizing techniques.

[Roger_Cavanagh]

If you're a PS CS user, I recommend saving your money (GF ain't cheap) and using the new bicubic smoother option for upsizing. I've seen a few posts discussing this topic since PS CS came out with no definite conclusions, so I say go for the cheap option.

However, also worth a mention is Qimage which does an excellent job of upsizing at print time. This has the advantage that you just have to produce one edited version of the image at the native size of your sensor and you can choose to print at 6x9, 10x15, 12x18 or whatever suits you.

Regards,

[Desperate Dan]

British Journal of Photography did a big group-test of this kind of interpolation software about 18 months ago. The humble shareware PaintShop Pro had the best result!

[ScottGregory]

Just going through this thought process myself. Take a look at the article by Daniel Cox, the Nikon wildlife guy in the new issue of Outdoor Photograher magazine, the September 2004 issue. On page 72 he discusses blowing up a digital file using Genuine Fractals. But I have heard also that the Bicubic Smoother in Photoshop CS works just as well or better. I have not personally had a chance to use the Smoother yet on my work, but my son has been using it and he swears by it for making large digital prints. He tells me to save my money and stick with the Photoshop CS solution.

Scott Gregory
London, Ontario