blowing up

[mrmacedonian]

Hey all, my sister moved into her dorm and I thought it'd be fun to blow up one of the photos of my cat for her -- she's got one she took with a camera phone printed out and I want to remedy that -- and I want to try the enlargement process and do it 30x20 for her.

I've got a 16bit, sRGB, .tiff, @350dpi - 3520x2347px, and its 10x6.7inches atm.

I went into Photoshop (CS4), checked constrain proportions, and typed in the new width of 30inches and selected the "(Best of Enlargements)" option in the drop-down and Photoshop did its thing. before I spend 20$+ on this I thought i'd search through here but every time I did the majority of hits have to do with film enlargers, sooo I thought I'd see if anyone's got tips/workflows for achieving a 3x enlargement starting from the specs above while maintaining as much image quality as possible.

If your suggestion involves a specific freestanding program or Photoshop plugin I'd appreciate it if the name and manufacturer were both there so I can find it quickly and accurately

Links, Books, Google Search phrases are welcome, I'm certainly not against doing my own research (exactly what I'm doing as this gets read/responded to); I just figured I'd benefit more from the experience in these "halls."

Thanks for reading

p.s. I'll post the photo but it'll have to be an 8bit JPEG for Flickr, but I'll keep the size @original (to establish original image quality).

 

[mrmacedonian]

EXIF:

Camera Canon EOS 50D
Exposure 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture f/1.8
Focal Length 50 mm
ISO Speed 800
Exposure Bias 0 EV

Note 1: I ran this through Imagenomic's Noiseware Professional
Note 2: I of course have the RAW if I need to do other things before cropping, adjusting curves, etc.

 

[abnormalreply]

This is lovely, but I think most people should remember that just because their lens can open up really wide doesn't necessarily they should always open it up all they way. With most lenses, the widest aperture is rarely the sharpest and not always necessary. I think this would be a really nice picture if the rest of the cat was also in focus.

 

[mrmacedonian]

no this was actually a decision I made rather than just a happening. I could have opened it to 1.4

but in all seriousness, this is the DoF I wanted for this particular photo, maybe f/2.0 but then again with a cat you can't really tell her to get back into position I'm quite happy with the photo, just wanna learn how to explode it to 30x20

 

[LCARSx32]

Does your sister like pop art? Because you could enlarge the image to the proper dimmensions in photoshop and then apply the "color halftone" filter. It would look fine from a distance but up close would be little circles of color. Like a comic or newspaper.

It's a good way to blow up images while still having something neat to look at when up close.

Just an idea.

 

[dak1b]

love the cat!

great details on the eyes. eyes almost make it.

very nice.

 

[mrmacedonian]

That's a pretty sweet idea! I'm not sure how much she'd appreciate it, but hell I could find a photo to treat like that and print for myself!

 

[mrmacedonian]

love the cat!

great details on the eyes. eyes almost make it.

very nice.

Thanks! I love the eyes as well

 

[mrmacedonian]

No one has any wisdom concerning an enlargement from 10x6.7 to 30x20? :-\

Preference of program, workflow of steps, anything?

 

[Taylor510ce]

for big enlargements many people use "genuine fractals" But if you can get 300dpi easily in photoshop without massive loss of quality then no need.

Genuine Fractals 6 Professional Edition - onOne Software go to the features tab and look at the chart showing how big you can go.

 

[mrmacedonian]

Well, the original photo was exported from Lightroom @350dpi/ppi, giving the above specifications. If I go into image size and just type in the 30x20 and select Bicubic it increases the size - the dpi doesn't change.

it can't maintain a ppi of 350 @30x20 so its obviously using the bicubic linear algorithm to produce those pixels. I was expecting it to drop the ppi by 1/3 (~115ppi) instead of compensating by producing the pixels.

any way, i'll give GFractlas a try thank you

 

[KmH]

I've got a 16bit, sRGB, .tiff, @350dpi - 3520x2347px, and its 10x6.7inches atm.

With pixel dimensions of 3520 x 2347 pixels the photo can be printed at 35.20" x 23.47" at 100 ppi and the photo already has a 3:2 aspect ratio, the same as a 30 x 20 print.

A 30 x 20 print would normally be viewed from several feet away and 100 ppi could well be more than sufficient.

A key would be the noise level in the image, plus the sharpening technique(s) and amount of sharpening done. Photos can be sharpened more for chromogenic printing than they can for monitor display or inkjet printing.

If you are planning to upload to an online print lab like Mpix, they want the image file in the sRGB color space, JPEG file format, and no embedded color profiles. It is virtually impossible to see the difference between a TIFF and JPEG saved at a high quality setting.

Mpix.com - Help - How To Prepare Your Images.

 

[mrmacedonian]

I ran the photo through GFractals6 Plugin and from what I can tell on my monitor the photo looks pretty good. I'm going to bring just the face section as part of a 8x10 tiled set and get an idea of the quality.

Thanks KmH, I wasn't really planning on using an exceptional printer I was just going to get it done at like a Walgreens for 19-20$. I suppose I should be diligent enough to check out Mpix, Snapfish, Shutterfly, etc and compare prices. This little project isn't for a customer or anything just experimentation, experience, and hopefully a pretty fun poster

I'll take a look around tonight and see if I can find a deal on it and get it ordered in the next day or so. Thanks for all the input

 

[KmH]

Personally, I would cross Snapfish and Shutterfly off my list.

The photo you posted is huge pixel dimension wise, and should have been resized before posting it. Yes, the forum does so automatically, at least eventually, but it still takes a significant amount of time to load and is poor netiquette to post that big.

 

[mrmacedonian]

The photo you posted is huge pixel dimension wise, and should have been resized before posting it. Yes, the forum does so automatically, at least eventually, but it still takes a significant amount of time to load and is poor netiquette to post that big.

Apologies, I typically do resize or at the very least only post the Medium or Large version on Flickr. The reason that this time I posted the original pixels is due to the nature of the question/situation.

I in no way, shape or form wanted to explode anyone's computer or internet connection, I'm sorry.