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Old April 25th 15, 05:02 PM posted to rec.photo.digital
****big cheese****
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Default best image enlargement software?

On 04/24/2015 10:14 AM, Savageduck wrote:
On 2015-04-24 12:43:43 +0000, ****big cheese**** said:

I have been recently evaluating image enlargement using Photoshop CC
(detail preservation), Photozoom Pro 6, and Perfect Resize. This is
all on a 64 bit Win 7 system on a Dell Inspiron laptop. Had some
initial problems with Perfect Resize as my laptop's video drivers/
card wouldn't support it, so I had to install on my desktop with
supported card.

After using all 3 programs, and from what I could find googling these
seemed to be the best enlargers at present, I don't really find any
significant difference. In fact, so far, just barely above the age
old bicubic resampling the original Photoshop and other programs offered.

Photos I'm enlarging are generally 16 bit TIFF that do sometimes have
artifacts to start with, but I can sort of negate these artifacts with
any one of these three programs. Enlargements have generally ranged
from 200-500%.

Overall, I'm not all that pleased. Photozoom costs quite a lot, not
sure about CC and Perfect Resize. Perhaps I'm not using the correct
settings, although I have experimented and customized a LOT of them,
or perhaps there are better enlargement programs out there, which is
why I turned here.

Thanks, in advance, for your replies.


For enlargement after some cropping, the current releases of Photoshop
CS6 & CC both use rsizing which does a very good job of bringing even a
sev crop up to normal sizes and slightly.
For extreme enlargement of 200%-500% such as you have been talking
about, I have always got good results from Perfect Resize. However, I
will add the caveat that I was working with RAW image files, or TIFFS of
PSDs which where producd directly from the RAWs.
You talk of the TIFFs you are enlarging having artifacts to start with.
Why? Were they originally JPRGs converted to TIFF, or were they scans to
TIFF?


No, these TIFFS were presharpened, either by unsharp masking, wavelets,
or blind deconvolution, and ended up with artifacts. Perhaps I should
try enlarging first and then applying sharpening. I still have the
original unsharpened TIFFs/ RAWs still available.


Then there is an application I haven't used, because Perfect Resize
meets my needs, Alien Skin's "Blow Up".
http://www.alienskin.com/blowup/


Thanks for that and your response. I think I'll stick with the ones I'm
already trying for now. One other issue I'm running into is noise.
Even without sharpening, noise begins to be seen during enlargement. I
can offset some of it with Neat Image, but I have an older version. I
really need to have the capability of selecting several suitable areas
but the version I have only seems to allow a single area.