[hatts]

A few years ago, I wanted to make a poster of one of my photos. I knew I had taken a shit low-res photo in the first place, so I dealt with this by enlarging the photo, and then intentionally giving it a bit of blur. It was sort of a moody scene anyway, the blur looked nice. My reasoning was that I would rather see a blur effect than obvious pixellation artifacts.

I've decided to do this again, but this time around, blurring the image wouldn't stylistically make sense. I'd be willing to impose some other artificial effect though, if it lent well to the image.

Do you all have any clever methods for enlarging images to be used for print? Are there any known industry workarounds for enlarging low-res images?

[simmsimaging]

Photozoom pro.

[bograt]

Interpolation is the method... and call me mad but I like to blow it up very big and then apply a bit of noise/grain (maybe varying scale and amount for different colour channels) to avoid things getting too soft and adding a bit of an analog quality.
Maybe like I had a nice large format camera but I was out of focus
I always keep it very subtle though

[bograt]

But be careful with photozoom pro, sometimes I have seen this effect on large prints in shop windows and it looks like someone has used a photoshop 'hand painted' filter effect. it looks sharper from afar though, but not very pretty

[sandykoufax]

make plane , mapping , render big size.

[hatts]

Thanks for the tip on Photozoom...it's pretty impressive, but I can definitely see what bograt means regarding the distinctive "painted" look.

I like the idea of adding a bit of grain. Sort of like my blur technique in that you're basically just covering up shit with different, intentional shit.

And sandykoufax, it is already too tempting to do basic tasks in 3D apps...I already find myself doing vector drawings in Solidworks

[Maximus3D]

You need to keep in mind that the larger the images are the further away they should be viewed so blurriness and noise will never really be noticable unless you push your nose up against it. Then it also depends on what type of paper it's printed, some papers make it ever harder close to impossible to see noise such as canvas where noise and sharpness of the image are irrelevant.

/ Magnus

[simmsimaging]

Thanks for the tip on Photozoom...it's pretty impressive, but I can definitely see what bograt means regarding the distinctive "painted" look.

That painted looks is a byproduct of the fact that Photozoom doesn't actually work by magic There's only so much you can do when inventing detail out of literally nothing. All enlargement software suffers similar problems. Photozoom looks smoother (depening on the settings) but alternatives just look clumpy instead.

Anyway, Maximus is correct: it's viewing distance dependent. If you actually need to view something up that close you need to start with a better picture. Or find a magician.

/b

[Maximus3D]

It's probably easier to find a magician than to take (or render) better pictures.

/ Magnus