72 ppi DV frame to 300 dpi 22×35 poster?

No.

To expand upon Ho’s entirely accurate answer:

There just isn’t enough data there. It sounds like you’d need to upsample by a factor of >10. You can try – just use the Image Size command with "resampling" checked. But the likely hood of success is tiny – very few images can take that kind of treatment.

Sorry.

….unless also viewed from a great distance. 😉

…unless also viewed from a great distance.

You mean like from a commercial jetliner flying at 32,000 feet? 🙂

LLAH!

<sarcasm>
I don’t know why not. They do it on TV and in the movies all the time. </sarcasm>

Don,

Yeah you gotta love that one click "enhance" button or better yet the magic 3D camera in "Enemy Of The State".

My favourite is still the "police portrait of a suspect" scene:

"Now make the hair brown"

<keyboard tapping>

"…make it longer…"

<more keyboard tapping>

"That’s him/her! print it out and put out an APB"

<picks up glossy colour photo "coming out" of a BW laser printer>

Rene:

You forgot: "Make him 10 years older and turn his head to one side …"

I personally like the old "high-definition-photo-extracted-from-4-pixels" trick.

Where can I get a free plugin to do that?

Don_McCahill wrote:

<sarcasm>
I don’t know why not. They do it on TV and in the movies all the time. </sarcasm>

LOL… I’m watching "24" this season and in one of the recent episodes Kim Bauer (who I’m just hoping beyond hope will die a horrible, horrible death somehow) is view what looks to be a small, lo-res webcam surveilance image of her father being loaded onto an airplane. Click, click and the image is enlarged to full-screen (which, in this case, looks to be a 50" plasma display) and crystal clear.

I nearly fell off the couch laughing at the absurdity of it.

It’s the Blade Runner effect, click…enhance…click…move right…enhance

You’re right, Brian – Kim Bauer must die 😉 She went from sniveling kid victim last season to sniveling computer data expert over the summer

click and the image is enlarged to full-screen (which, in this case, looks to be a 50" plasma display) and crystal clear.

On the other hand none of have any idea what the government spy agencies can do. Lets face it they can be spending all of those billions on $20,000 hammers and $30,000 toilet seats!

Robert

Sondra,

Is there a filter or something in or out of Photoshop that would make a frame from a Premiere project print well at 22×35–or even 16×20? Or possibly part of a frame, so it could be portrait rather than landscape?

Well, as you may have gathered from the jolly responses above, this isn’t generally recognized as something you can do. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it a try. Whether you will be satisfied with the result depends, in part, on your expectations for "print well".

I print a lot of frame grabs from DV video, but I haven’t tried to print anything larger than an 8×10. I do use a lot of "tricks", both inside Photoshop and outside, to compensate for starting with an image that measures only 654 x 480 square pixels.

If you are willing to regard your 16×20 or 22×35 prints as posters rather than as a fine art prints, you have a chance of getting something you will like, but you will need several tools in addition to Photoshop (I use Neat Image, Focus Magic, and Genuine Fractals). If you don’t mind a sort of "stylized" look, you could convert your image to a vector graphic, which can be scaled as large as you like. If you are really committed to higher yet bitmap quality, you will need to use special expensive software that processes several sequential frames. With that technique, it is possible to retreive some remarkably good stills from video.

That software is called VideoFOCUS from Salient Stills (there is also a VideoFOCUS Lite version with a reduced feature set) and it processes consecutive images from a section of surveillance tape, or from any video, to obtain greatly enhanced stills. Even though single frames of surveillance tapes are virtually useless, VideoFOCUS has been very successful at extracting useful stills from them. Many newspapers and magazines use VideoFOCUS to extract printable stills from their video footage. This website shows how VideoFOCUS works:

<http://www.upsizing.co.jp/english/videofocus2.htm>

VideoFOCUS does the seemingly impossible by extracting additional information from nearby frames and using a smart mathematical correlation technique to focus and inject that information into the particular frame you have selected. Surveillance tapes are typically very low quality and no single frame is any good, but a sequence of frames, when properly processed, can yield some amazing results. A couple of examples of the quality enhancements achieved are shown at:

<http://www.upsizing.co.jp/english/videofocus.htm>

A couple of examples of VideoFOCUS used on surveillance tape are shown at:

< http://www.latimerclarke.com/index.php?option=news&task= viewarticle&sid=39>

<http://www.videosciences.com/>

VideoFOCUS is not priced for private ownership, because it is quite expensive and is usually purchased by a government agency, a law enforcement agency, or a media corporation. Even VideoFOCUS Lite, bundled with a PC, is priced at $9,995.

<http://www.salientstills.com/web-brochure/index.html>

The Salient Stills homepage is:

<http://www.salientstills.com/>

Until a consumer version of VideoFOCUS, or something like it, becomes available, we will have to rely on processing a single video frame with tools like Neat Image, Focus Magic, and Genuine Fractals. If you want to know more about that, let me know.

— Burton —

Burton,

I may be completely off base in thinking this, but for some subjects, I can see that the "don’t even dream of it" priced software could possibly be modified and used to turn a series of 35 mm slide scans (enlarged past being usable) being turned into the equlivlent of a 4×5 inch original (or at least a 6×7 cm).

Bill

Bill,

Yes, that could work if you had one of those SLRs that can take several pictures in rapid succession. But I imagine that the computer processing times would be very large in that case, based on the much larger number of total pixels that would be involved in the computations. But for the extra quality image, the wait would probably be worth it.

— Burton —

I’d given up on this after the first few responses that what I want is impossible. Then I got an email from Extensis mentioning their pxl SmartScale, which gave me new hope. And I was elated to find other products in Burton’s post, and most of them under $10,000 (for the light version). I’m downloading Focus Magic now. It looks as though I may get a fairly good enlargement after all. It is for a poster, not fine art.

Sondra,

Here’s a cheap idea you might want to try before spending a tidy sum on new software. It goes counter to the 100% digital workflow mentioned in the other posts, but sometimes the old ways can still bail you out.

Make a small but good print from your Premier file. Scale the file to equal the resolution of your printer so you’re printing pixel-for-pixel. Take the print to a "real" wet photo lab and have them make a large format copy neg (or transparency). Here comes the trick: they will have to de-focus their copy camera slightly when they do the copying. This should blur the dots and basically create a new "continuous tone" negative. Then they can scan the piece of film based on the resolution you need for your big print.

You can then bring it back into PS and do what needs to be done there to resharpen, etc. And you should be able to get to the file-on-CD stage for $25 to $50.

Make sure the lab understands the whole process–especially the need for de-focusing. This goes totally against what they usually do, so they may be unwilling to try it.

You can even do the copying yourself if you have a camera with a manual focusing lens and some good, even lighting. Use film with a speed of 100. And shoot with the lens pretty much wide-open so the dots don’t get picked up by the lens. If you have a bunch of images to convert, use a medium format camera and you can quickly do the copying in a production line fashion.

It might even be possible to use a digital camera for the copying but I’d be on the lookout for moire effects. And the file size will have to be huge for the size print you’re looking for. Personally, I’d stick with film and scanning.

I wish I could tell you how much to de-focus the image, but I think you’ll just have to experiment with it.

This olde-timey approach works pretty well, especially with photos that don’t contain small, thin details like tree branches or type.

Let us know how it comes out if you try this method.

I realize this post has more to do with photography than PhotoShop, but I thought Sondra could use another perspective. I apologize in advance.

Chuck Lambert