photoshop cs genuine fractures plug in

[T GERSON]

Can anyone tell me if they have used this plug in . I want to know in doing a large format print will this help in low res photos and how much?

 

[Techman]

i used it,, it help.. but the better the photo the better the results..

You will never take a 2x2 gif and blow it up to a poster..

I used a nice 111x14 digi photo and blew it up to 36x36 and it was great.. no noticable pixelation.

 

[Bigdawg]

We use it too. If it's a bad photo to begin with Genuine Fractals will only accent the problem. I've blown up small (2x3) photos that were high quality to a full page bleed. A small amount of softness, but nothing like it would have been just using photoshop.

 

[dennis j]

We also use it I agree with Bigdawg

 

[Bobby H]

It's the old graphic arts saw "garbage in = garbage out."

Considering the growth in things like high resolution stock photo houses (such as istockphoto.com) one can find lots of appropriately high resolution images for large format output for not very much money.

 

[JMDigital]

It's the old graphic arts saw "garbage in = garbage out."

Considering the growth in things like high resolution stock photo houses (such as istockphoto.com) one can find lots of appropriately high resolution images for large format output for not very much money.

Thats true.. Its when someone gives you a business card and says.. I need this 10 ft tall and they have no idea where the original artwork is and the business cards are printed in-house on a laser printer.. the file is a small word document.. I guess I need to find this plugin for photoshop.. :Big Laugh

 

[WVB]

I personally use a standalone program called Shortcut PhotoZoom.

 

[RobGF]

Before anybody spends money on resampling software such as GF or Photozoom they might want to research "stair interpolation". The thought is that if you bicubic upsample your images in lots of small steps rather than one single upsample you will get very good results. So, rather than take a 5 x 7" photo and resample it up to 15" x 21" in one operation, the user would sample up 5% over and over again. If you find this technique useful you could make a Photoshop action and assign it to a key.

I tried out demo versions of many of the upsampling programs. Sometimes they worked better than stair interpolation but just as often they did not.

Do a google search for stair interpolation and you should find a number of sites that discuss it.

http://www.fredmiranda.com/SI/ has some discussion. They also wrote a little plug in to make stair upsampling easier.

 

[thewood]

Good post, Rob. Intersting stuff...

 

[Bigdawg]

I bought the plug-in (action set) that he had available a few years ago. It does do a very good job, but I found Genuine Fractals edged it out on most things. It was a very affordable alternative. The advantage was that I could run it straight from photoshop where you have to save GF files in their format and reopen them to actually resize.

 

[dennis j]

The new version of Genuine Fractals will run straight from Photoshop with out saving and reopening the file.

 

[Bigdawg]

Ahhhh - good reason to upgrade! We use it quite a bit on the print design end to bump the res in pictures I need bigger. I'll have to take a look. We've had our version for 4 years and it has served us very well so I never even thought about upgrading it. Definitely paid for itself many times over.