Photo megapixel help

[Stacey K]

I do all the school senior banners. The kids are slightly smaller than life size and we have a gal who takes the photos and thus far, she has not had to retake but a few. "Brad" is about the worst one I had so far, just so you have an idea of the quality.

For "band" the director took them with an IPad and they are grainy. He wants to know if he can take them with his 12 megapixel IPhone instead...

I don't know the answer to this.

I'm going to attach a few samples.

The banners are 2'x4'. You can see the banner itself (screenshot), the touched up photo of Brad - the other photo is a band director photo taken with his IPad. If you blow them both up, you can clearly see a big difference. I'm not sure what to tell him to do, if anything...I've never thought the quality of my IPhone photos were very good.

 

[Pauly]

Megapixels is not the answer.
You can have a huge 50mp camera with crap image quality.
Sensors, lenses, etc all come into play.

Iphones generally have a better camera than the ipads. as long as the iphone is the same year or newer than the ipad, id say go for it.

Also try do it in a well lit (natural light) room.

 

[Goatshaver]

Yeah they definitely need to do in better light conditions than where she was, lots of grain in that one.
I'd say they also need to make sure they are taking them at the biggest resolution they can on their phone if that's the only option. Some phones you can select different resolutions. Definitely not to use the selfie camera or the Ipad as Pauly said.

 

[Solventinkjet]

Make sure they are sending the original file. A lot of phones/tablets will automatically downsample images being sent over text or email. Usually there is an override to send the original file though.

 

[Stacey K]

Thanks guys...I'll relay the message! Hopefully this helps

For the soccer pictures...they took them in a corner outside out of the wind and there was a ray of sunlight on the ball and half the arm for all but one girl. I ended up photoshopping the good arm into all the other pictures LOL

It's a bit hard with these...the football guys are wide, the dance girls are tiny...the photo gal never gets anyone's elbows in the photos...they always take them after practice so Boudica ends up helping me with sweat removal, beard adding, etc. LOL It's a good gig...I do almost as many fatheads from these pics as I do banners.

 

[weyandsign]

This website is great to easily upscale images:

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[Gino]

How 'bout the band director asks your gal to take the pictures for him and show him the difference.

Ya either pay for you to clean them up and still have half/a$$ed pictures or pay your gal and have it done right. Tell him to stick to his music and you'll all get along just splendidly.

 

[Boudica]

The past few years we've been doing pole banners for the graduating seniors in a couple of small towns. the image quality was all over the place. I told the gal who was coordinating this:
These will be printed at 30” wide and 60” tall – they need to be at least 150dpi. In pixels, this translates to 4500 x 9000

It seemed to help, because the pictures have been usable, if not great ever since.

 

[jfiscus]

Also, if the photos are "maybe ok" quality, get Gigapixel AI and run them through that and then they'll be "acceptable" quality.
FWIW, it only works well on images that have NOT YET been resized by any other programs.
So, if someone already used PS to resize the results aren't as good as starting from the original unmolested image.

 

[Jay Grooms]

Also, if the photos are "maybe ok" quality, get Gigapixel AI and run them through that and then they'll be "acceptable" quality.
FWIW, it only works well on images that have NOT YET been resized by any other programs.
So, if someone already used PS to resize the results aren't as good as starting from the original unmolested image.

Second the use of Gigapixel..... amazing software.

 

[Boudica]

+3 for Gigapixel. like Jfiscus said - it works best with an unmolested image

 

[Gino]

That's how the toad used to like his little girls.

I miss that guy. He kept things lively.

 

[McDonald Signs]

Try the LetsEnhance website to sharpen up the photos and make them clearer. It works pretty good if the photo is pretty decent to start with.
Also RemoveBg for removing the background around the player.

 

[jochwat]

Also, if the photos are "maybe ok" quality, get Gigapixel AI and run them through that and then they'll be "acceptable" quality.
FWIW, it only works well on images that have NOT YET been resized by any other programs.
So, if someone already used PS to resize the results aren't as good as starting from the original unmolested image.

I'll third the Gigapixel love (or whatever number we're on now). Slightly off the actual topic, I've found that Gigapixel has another superpower that I've been using very often: it can be great at reconstructing text / logo line art. I was working some sponsor signs and shirts for a 5K run event, and strangely enough, all of the logo art I received from the sponsors was terrible! The usual ultra-low-res, website header logo grabs. So I take a logo, drop it into Giga, fiddle with the settings, and 80% of the time, I get an enlarged bitmap that I trace in Illustrator for a perfectly usable vector logo. Or if you prefer, you can just use the bitmap, but I like to go with as much vector as possible. Anyway, another use for another great tool.

 

[bob]

Second the use of Gigapixel..... amazing software.

Agree that what it does is amazing. However it's glacially slow when dealing with realistic sizes and resolutions and its user interface is from hell. Moreover the gigapixel 'forum' is far more a celebration of love than a place where useful information might be gleaned. As far as I can tell, any product deficiencies are the fault of something else. Memory. Non-ssd drives. Inadequate graphics board. Just what does that last, graphics board, have to do with enlarging and improving bitmaps?

Still, the end result is indeed amazing.

 

[balstestrat]

Agree that what it does is amazing. However it's glacially slow when dealing with realistic sizes and resolutions and its user interface is from hell. Moreover the gigapixel 'forum' is far more a celebration of love than a place where useful information might be gleaned. As far as I can tell, any product deficiencies are the fault of something else. Memory. Non-ssd drives. Inadequate graphics board. Just what does that last, graphics board, have to do with enlarging and improving bitmaps?

Still, the end result is indeed amazing.

A lot of this AI stuff can run on GPU a lot faster than CPU. And in a way when you think about it, dedicated graphics board should be better at dealing with graphics workload than cpu, no?

 

[Humble PM]

Giga pixel barely touches the CPU - all on GPU. Base level M1 macbook runs rings around my dual xeon workstation with 8GB GPU (completes in 5% of the time). If you want to use this regularly in work, then get the appropriate tool to run it.
UI is thoroughly annoying, usual modern dumbed down approach, though it would be interesting to try it on a top of the line machine - might reveal itself to be more useable.

 

[Humble PM]

2x enlargement run through Topaz Photo AI.

Not as good as a real camera, but scarily useable. Render time around 45 seconds with six other programmes running.

 

[Stacey K]

OK - so they took the pictures again. They are still blurry and the file sizes are larger than the other photos I have! I have the Topaz but it's taking forever and I have 17 of these.

So the band one is the newest file and they are being emailed - too big so there's a link. The tennis player is direct from a disk from earlier in the year but a smaller file. What the heck is going on here? I'm getting frustrated....LOL

Microsoft OneDrive - Access files anywhere. Create docs with free Office Online.

Store photos and docs online. Access them from any PC, Mac or phone. Create and work together on Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents.

1drv.ms

 

[GAC05]

Have seen any of these kids face to face? Maybe this latest generation are just blurry & not photogenic.