Resizing an Image With Genuine Fractals, and Then Sending It Out for Printing?

S
Posted By
soulis
Nov 5, 2005
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756
Replies
19
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All my images are JPEGs with size 1024×768 and 72 dpi.
I need to have a few of these pictures printed at 3 times that size. I have a few questions about this.

(I) Should I first resize my images with Genuine Fractals? If yes, what exactly size and dpi should the new images be? Do I need to first save them differently with Photoshop? I do have all the relevant PSD files.

(II) After I prepare them with (I), where can I send them online for printing? Could you suggest a reliable company?

I have never really done any serious printing before, so excuse me if I cannot be more specific.

Windows XP, 3.4 GB CPU, 1 GB Ram, Photoshop CS2.

Thank you in advance!

maria

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T
Tacit
Nov 5, 2005
In article ,
maria wrote:

All my images are JPEGs with size 1024×768 and 72 dpi.

You are already walking down the wrong path.

1024×768 is fine for screen. It is not fine for printing at a reasonably large size. Because you haven’t said what size you are printing the images at–one inch wide? Two inches wide? Five? Ten?–we can’t really give you the answer you are looking for.

JPEG degrades the quality of your images. JPEG is not suitable for professional printing. You should never, ever save an image as a JPEG unless you have a clear and specific reason why the image has to be JPEG and no other format will do. The JPEG compression format was intended for situations where file size on disk is critical and picture quality is not important.

I need to have a few of these pictures printed at 3 times that size. I have a few questions about this.

(I) Should I first resize my images with Genuine Fractals? If yes, what exactly size and dpi should the new images be? Do I need to first save them differently with Photoshop? I do have all the relevant PSD files.

Genuine Fractals is a program unethically marketed with hysterical hype claiming it can do things it simply cannot do.

Throw your images away and scan them again at the proper size and resolution. Nothing–not Photoshop, not Genuine Fractals, nothing–can increase the pixel resolution of a raster image and create image detail that does not exist in the original. It cannot be done, by any procedure or any program–it is not even theoretically possible. This is why it is important that when you work with computer images, you create your images at the proper resolution to begin with.

(II) After I prepare them with (I), where can I send them online for printing? Could you suggest a reliable company?
I have never really done any serious printing before, so excuse me if I cannot be more specific.

When you say "printing," what do you mean? Do you mean making a photographic print? Do you mean printing on a printing press?


Art, photography, shareware, polyamory, literature, kink: all at http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html
BW
Bob Williams
Nov 5, 2005
maria wrote:

All my images are JPEGs with size 1024×768 and 72 dpi.
I need to have a few of these pictures printed at 3 times that size. I have a few questions about this.

(I) Should I first resize my images with Genuine Fractals? If yes, what exactly size and dpi should the new images be? Do I need to first save them differently with Photoshop? I do have all the relevant PSD files.

(II) After I prepare them with (I), where can I send them online for printing? Could you suggest a reliable company?
I have never really done any serious printing before, so excuse me if I cannot be more specific.

Windows XP, 3.4 GB CPU, 1 GB Ram, Photoshop CS2.

Thank you in advance!

maria

You really don’t have enough pixels (less than 1MP) to do much of anything with. About the very best you can do is make a fairly decent 4×6 print. (Not good, but acceptable) If you want to make a much larger print, say 11×14, you will have to resample your image in Photoshop to about 3072 x 2304 pixels (I don’t think G.F. will do any better on this image than PS). The quality will not be good but it will be as good as possible, considering your low-pixel original. As Tacit explained, NO PROGRAM or manipulation can create any more image information than exists in the original image.

It sounds like you downloaded a WEB image. or used the smallest size available in an entry level digicam. If it is a web image you are pretty well stuck with what you have. If you can retake the picture, use the largest image size and the least compression that your camera permits. BTW, 72 dpi is meaningless in this context. Only the number of pixels are meaningful.
Bob Williams
J
Jim
Nov 5, 2005
"maria" wrote in message
All my images are JPEGs with size 1024×768 and 72 dpi.
I need to have a few of these pictures printed at 3 times that size. I have a few questions about this.
3x what size? 72 dpi has no meaning; all that matters is the pixel count.
(I) Should I first resize my images with Genuine Fractals?
No, just use PS for resizing. Genuine Fractals is over sold.
If yes, what exactly size and dpi should the new images be?
You are going about this all wrong. First, you need to decide on what size you want the prints to be.
Next, you need to decide what dpi you want the print to be. Then, and only then, you can determine the number of pixels that you need.
Do I need to first save them differently with Photoshop? I do have all the relevant PSD files.
Go back to the PSD files and start over.
(II) After I prepare them with (I), where can I send them online for printing? Could you suggest a reliable company?
Can’t help you here, I do my own printing.
I have never really done any serious printing before, so excuse me if I cannot be more specific.

Windows XP, 3.4 GB CPU, 1 GB Ram, Photoshop CS2.

Thank you in advance!

maria
To be more specific, let us suppose that you want to make 8×10 prints, and that your PSD files have enough pixels for that size.
A good setting of dpi is 200 to 300. I will use 250.
Hence, you need a file which contains 8 time 250 (2000 ) on the short side and 10 times 250 (2500) on the long side. So, in the image size box, you enter 8 for the short side, check the maintain proportions box, check the resize box, select bicubic interpolation, and enter 250 in the pixel count box, Then you perform the resizing.
If, as is usually the case, the aspect ratio of the original results in an image which is 8×12, you must crop 2 inches off the long side. Now, you are ready to send the file to the printer using their instructions on the proper format. I would save the image as a tiff file. Jim
A7
aka 717
Nov 5, 2005
I would use Photoshop and make the file about 1.5 times the line screen of the printer, if you are going 4 color. I’m not sure but maybe 200 dpi for inkjet or similar, like an Iris, or whatever is the newest technology for large format inkjets.

How good the resolution is depends on how far away the picture is going to be viewed as well as the quality of the sample. If you’re going to put a poster on a wall, it doesn’t need to be the same detail as a picture that you’re going to hold in your hand.

The bottom line is really to talk to the printer, if you’re going to go to a print shop because he will know his output’s limitations and requirements and might have samples. If you’re going to print it yourself then experiment but I wouldn’t be afraid of jpeg. In my experience high quality jpegs are usually fine.

"maria" wrote in message
All my images are JPEGs with size 1024×768 and 72 dpi.
I need to have a few of these pictures printed at 3 times that size. I have a few questions about this.

(I) Should I first resize my images with Genuine Fractals? If yes, what exactly size and dpi should the new images be? Do I need to first save them differently with Photoshop? I do have all the relevant PSD files.

(II) After I prepare them with (I), where can I send them online for printing? Could you suggest a reliable company?
I have never really done any serious printing before, so excuse me if I cannot be more specific.

Windows XP, 3.4 GB CPU, 1 GB Ram, Photoshop CS2.

Thank you in advance!

maria
S
soulis
Nov 6, 2005
Thank you all very much for your help. Let me be a little more lear. I work on 1024×768 images because I manipulate the images with Photoshop and other programs. I cannot work on them when they are at any bigger sizes. BTW, how do you guys work on huge images on your screen with Photoshop? Many filter and painting plug-ins would take forever to implenet at such large sizes.
Now, back to the printing. I need to have printed images of size 28×21(lengthxheight) inches. That is a 4×3 size as the 1024×768. I can save my 1024×768 image in any format because I have it as a PSD file.
The original images were JPGs at 8 megapixels. However, I need to have printed the modified PSD images which are now 1024×768. What should I do?

(1) What should I put as a ppi for the resulting image?

(2) What is the best format to save my image in with Photoshop (TIF, Etc.)?

(3) Would the image then be ready for the printer? I do have Genuine Fractals and Smartscale. but as most of you said/implied, I don’t really need these programs at these dimensions.

Thank you very much, again!

maria
NS
Nicholas Sherlock
Nov 6, 2005
maria wrote:
I cannot work on them when they
are at any bigger sizes. BTW, how do you guys work on huge images on your screen with Photoshop?

Buy a better computer. Get more ram.

The original images were JPGs at 8 megapixels. However, I need to have printed the modified PSD images which are now 1024×768. What should I do?

You can’t print those images at that physical size, it’ll look like crap. Go back to the originals and start again, keeping the original image size (8 megapixel).

Cheers,
Nicholas Sherlock
S
soulis
Nov 6, 2005
On Sun, 06 Nov 2005 16:32:31 +1300, Nicholas Sherlock
wrote:

maria wrote:
I cannot work on them when they
are at any bigger sizes. BTW, how do you guys work on huge images on your screen with Photoshop?

Buy a better computer. Get more ram.

The original images were JPGs at 8 megapixels. However, I need to have printed the modified PSD images which are now 1024×768. What should I do?

You can’t print those images at that physical size, it’ll look like crap. Go back to the originals and start again, keeping the original image size (8 megapixel).

Cheers,
Nicholas Sherlock

Nicholas,

I have 1GB RAM and 3.4 GB CPU. Now, even if the plug-ins work fine, how do you work on such a large image that goes much beyond the dimensions of your screen? This is very important to me. Thank you!

maria
MR
Mike Russell
Nov 6, 2005
"maria" wrote in message

I have 1GB RAM and 3.4 GB CPU. Now, even if the plug-ins work fine, how do you work on such a large image that goes much beyond the dimensions of your screen? This is very important to me. Thank you!

I just leave the image zoomed out, and zoom in for detailed work such as cloning. Photoshop was designed to work this way, with the image being much larger than the screen.

Try it, you’ll like it. Add another gig of ram and you should see a little better performance.

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
RL
Rainer Latka
Nov 6, 2005
maria schrieb am Sonntag, 6. November 2005 03:54:

Thank you all very much for your help. Let me be a little more lear. I work on 1024×768 images because I manipulate the images with Photoshop and other programs. I cannot work on them when they are at any bigger sizes. BTW, how do you guys work on huge images on your screen with Photoshop? Many filter and painting plug-ins would take forever to implenet at such large sizes.

I wonder why you consider 1024×768 to be a large image. I am working with about 5200x3500px images without major problems regularly on a PC that is slower than yours (Windows XP, 1.1 GHz CPU, 1 GB Ram, Photoshop
6.0, now CS)

Rainer

[…]
K
KatWoman
Nov 6, 2005
"Rainer Latka" wrote in message
maria schrieb am Sonntag, 6. November 2005 03:54:

Thank you all very much for your help. Let me be a little more lear. I work on 1024×768 images because I manipulate the images with Photoshop and other programs. I cannot work on them when they are at any bigger sizes. BTW, how do you guys work on huge images on your screen with Photoshop? Many filter and painting plug-ins would take forever to implenet at such large sizes.

I wonder why you consider 1024×768 to be a large image. I am working with about 5200x3500px images without major problems regularly on a PC that is slower than yours (Windows XP, 1.1 GHz CPU, 1 GB Ram, Photoshop
6.0, now CS)

Rainer
yeah me too
try the navigator palette maria
S
soulis
Nov 7, 2005
On Sun, 6 Nov 2005 18:34:49 -0500, "KatWoman"
wrote:

"Rainer Latka" wrote in message
maria schrieb am Sonntag, 6. November 2005 03:54:

Thank you all very much for your help. Let me be a little more lear. I work on 1024×768 images because I manipulate the images with Photoshop and other programs. I cannot work on them when they are at any bigger sizes. BTW, how do you guys work on huge images on your screen with Photoshop? Many filter and painting plug-ins would take forever to implenet at such large sizes.

I wonder why you consider 1024×768 to be a large image. I am working with about 5200x3500px images without major problems regularly on a PC that is slower than yours (Windows XP, 1.1 GHz CPU, 1 GB Ram, Photoshop
6.0, now CS)

Rainer
yeah me too
try the navigator palette maria
Rainer and KarWoman:

I really did not claim that 1024×768 is a large size. However, it is a popular screen resolution size. I work on such images because I see exactly what I am doing. I thought that to print such an image at high dimensions, one would resort to magnifying programs like Photoshop itself, Genuine Fractals, or SmartScale.
I now see that I should work on the original digital image of my camera which is 3264×2448 (8 megapixels).
I am still puzzled by all your responses to my original message. You say that you work on the original image without any reduction whatsoever. How exactly do you do this? You work on a piece of a huge image and then view your work by zooming out to the screen size? Don’t you lose a good part of your work by viewing it so much reduced? And, KatWoma, what is the navigator palette? And where is it? Thank you all so much again!

maria
T
Tacit
Nov 7, 2005
In article ,
maria wrote:

Thank you all very much for your help. Let me be a little more lear. I work on 1024×768 images because I manipulate the images with Photoshop and other programs. I cannot work on them when they are at any bigger sizes. BTW, how do you guys work on huge images on your screen with Photoshop?

What are you using, an antique 386 system with 16 megabytes of RAM? Working on an 8 megapixel image on any reasonable computer from the past six years or so should be easy and painless; if you can’t do it, either your computer is an ancient antique or something is drastically, seriously wrong with your computer.

Many filter and painting plug-ins
would take forever to implenet at such large sizes.

8 MP is not large. Sounds like something is very wrong with your computer. Post its stats and maybe we can heklp you figure out why you are seeing such incredibly poor performance.

Now, back to the printing. I need to have printed images of size 28×21(lengthxheight) inches. That is a 4×3 size as the 1024×768. I can save my 1024×768 image in any format because I have it as a PSD file.
The original images were JPGs at 8 megapixels. However, I need to have printed the modified PSD images which are now 1024×768. What should I do?

Step 1: Click on the icon for the 1024×768 image.

Step 2: Drag it to the Trash. It’s garbage. Nothing you can do will make it print well at large sizes–nothing.

Step 3: Figure out what is wrong with your computer and fix the problem.

Step 4: Go back to the original 8 MP image and do your editing again.

Step 5: Print the high-resolution image.

(1) What should I put as a ppi for the resulting image?

You still have not said how you are printing the image, so we can’t tell you. Inkjet print? Professional printing on a printing press? Photographic printing?

(2) What is the best format to save my image in with Photoshop (TIF, Etc.)?

PSD or TIFF.

(3) Would the image then be ready for the printer? I do have Genuine Fractals and Smartscale. but as most of you said/implied, I don’t really need these programs at these dimensions.

The image will be ready for printing when you go back to the original, higher-resolution picture and work with that. If you work around whatever is wrong with your computer by reducing your image to screen size and then editing it, you will always get inferior results when you print it out.


Art, photography, shareware, polyamory, literature, kink: all at http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html
T
Tacit
Nov 7, 2005
In article ,
maria wrote:

You say that you work on the original image without any reduction whatsoever. How exactly do you do this? You work on a piece of a huge image and then view your work by zooming out to the screen size?

Yes.

Just to give you an idea of the kind of images people work with: in the world of print, a 45 megabyte image is considered to be fairly small, and I routinely work on images whose flattened size is 200 MB or more, and whose pixel dimension is 6,000 by 9,000 pixels or more.


Art, photography, shareware, polyamory, literature, kink: all at http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html
A7
aka 717
Nov 12, 2005
"Mike Russell" wrote in message
"maria" wrote in message

I have 1GB RAM and 3.4 GB CPU. Now, even if the plug-ins work fine, how do you work on such a large image that goes much beyond the dimensions of your screen? This is very important to me. Thank you!

I just leave the image zoomed out, and zoom in for detailed work such as cloning. Photoshop was designed to work this way, with the image being much larger than the screen.

Try it, you’ll like it. Add another gig of ram and you should see a little better performance.

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com

You can open a second view which will give you a
picture of what your close up work is doing in realtion
to the bigger picture.
R
reply
Nov 13, 2005
tacit wrote:
Genuine Fractals is a program unethically marketed with hysterical hype claiming it can do things it simply cannot do.
Programs change, mature and receive recognition for their functionality. Tacit never changes. The stance is always the same. Interpolation doesn’t work. If you need big pictures but a more expensive camera Blah, blah, blah. The same old story and it’s getting boring.

One day tactit may change although I think it will be by decomposition rather than enlightenment. The first 2 pics in this gallery contradict tactic. http://www.auspics.com/water First pic is representative example of the image in total. 2nd pic is a crop from the first after it was enlarged to 44" in it’s short dimension. I resized both pictures to 72 pixel pitch and reduced size for Internet display. I tried to keep the crop as close to actual size as I could so you’ll get the picture. 🙂

A Canon 20D is (if you use tactic’s math) limited to about 11"x14" prints. OK so I regularly make 44" wide prints from 20D (and 10D) files. The stitched together ones sometimes reach 10 feet long. Certainly their is change in the quality of the image. This change is mostly un noticed due to the fact you have to hold the picture away from your face to see it!

DJ
LL
Leonard Lehew
Nov 13, 2005
On Sat, 05 Nov 2005 20:54:30 -0600, maria wrote:

Thank you all very much for your help. Let me be a little more lear. I work on 1024×768 images because I manipulate the images with Photoshop and other programs. I cannot work on them when they are at any bigger sizes. BTW, how do you guys work on huge images on your screen with Photoshop?
I don’t quite follow this. I routinely work with 12MP images. The zoom function in Photshop allows you to see part or all of the image at any time without changing the number of pixels in the image.

On a related note, for most purposes, size and PPI are irrelevant. What is important is the number of pixels in the image and the color depth. Only when you are ready to target the image for print or display does the size/PPI come into play.
Many filter and painting plug-ins
would take forever to implenet at such large sizes.
Now, back to the printing. I need to have printed images of size 28×21(lengthxheight) inches. That is a 4×3 size as the 1024×768. I can save my 1024×768 image in any format because I have it as a PSD file.
The original images were JPGs at 8 megapixels. However, I need to have printed the modified PSD images which are now 1024×768. What should I do?
You are not doing to be able to produce results that are satisfactory by most standards from this image. You started out with an 8MP image. By resizing to 1024 x 768, you ended up with a 0.75 MP image. Your best bet is to go back to the original image and start over.

Conventional wisdom is that you need 300 PPI for printing. For 28 x 21, this is about 53MP. For most purposes, though, I think coventional wisdom is wrong. I’ve seen entirely satisfactory prints at say 150 PPI. For 28 x 21, this would be about 13MP.

That is at least in the ball park of the original 8MP image. If I were starting with the original 8MP image, I would suggest 2 possible approaches.

1. The 10% upsize approach. A pretty well-know Photoshop trick is to upsize the image using "bicubic smoother" in several 10% increments until you get the size you want.
2. Use Genuine Fractals.

In either case, I’d probably up-size it to roughly 8400 x 6300 pixels for this print size. I have GF and have tried it side-by-side with the 10% method. If I look at the resulting image very carefully, I think GF is slightly better — but only slightly, and I’m not convinced it is really noticable in prints viewed at any normal distance.

All of this assumes that you go back to the original 8MP image. If so, you should be able to get a satisfactory (for most purposes) image at the size you mention. However, there is simply not enough information left in a 1024 x 768 image to print at that size, and there is nothing you can do to change that.

If you did not save your original images, you made a big mistake. You should always without fail save the unaltered images from the camera. This is your digital negative. Indeed you should make sure you have 2 copies of it before you do anything else.
(1) What should I put as a ppi for the resulting image?

(2) What is the best format to save my image in with Photoshop (TIF, Etc.)?
The short answer is that you should store your work copies (remember you still should have your unchanged original) in a lossless format — I use Photoshop’s PSD format.
(3) Would the image then be ready for the printer? I do have Genuine Fractals and Smartscale. but as most of you said/implied, I don’t really need these programs at these dimensions.

Thank you very much, again!

maria
LL
Leonard Lehew
Nov 13, 2005
On Sun, 06 Nov 2005 19:03:44 -0600, maria wrote:
I am still puzzled by all your responses to my original message. You say that you work on the original image without any reduction whatsoever. How exactly do you do this? You work on a piece of a huge image and then view your work by zooming out to the screen size?
Yes.
Don’t you lose a good part of your work by viewing it so much reduced?
You don’t lose anything. Zooming affects only the screen display and not the image.
And, KatWoma, what is the navigator palette? And where is it? Thank you all so much again!
It’s one of the many palettes that Photoshop CS2 supports. Palette visibility is controlled by check boxes that appear on the Window command menu.

Photoshop is a powerful, flexible, professional-grade program. It also has a pretty steep learning curve, and the help facility is not a good place to start. You should invest in one or more of the many available books on the topic. You will be more successful if you invest some time to learn in a systematic way about digital photo editing in general and Photoshop in particular.
maria
C
Chris
Nov 13, 2005
One day tactit may change although I think it will be by decomposition rather than enlightenment. The first 2 pics in this gallery contradict tactic. http://www.auspics.com/water First pic is representative example of the image in total. 2nd pic is a crop from the first after it was enlarged to 44" in it’s short dimension. I resized both pictures to 72 pixel pitch and reduced size for Internet display. I tried to keep the crop as close to actual size as I could so you’ll get the picture. 🙂

Not a particularly good example, since you resampled both images before putting them online. If you’d taken a crop of the first image, upsampled, and put it right next to the original, the poor effects of upsampling would be more apparent.

You don’t resize to "72 pixel pitch" to put something online, anyway. Just decide how many pixels you want to display and export your image.


C
R
reply
Nov 13, 2005
Chris Havel wrote:
(stupid comment snipped… Even stupider one left.)
You don’t resize to "72 pixel pitch" to put something online, anyway. Just decide how many pixels you want to display and export your image.

72 DPI (PPI or just plain ordinary 72 pixel pitch)is a long accepted although often misused dimension for a computer monitor display. My method of using printer’s linear dimensioning (feet and inches) in a clear way to relate to a variable dimension with no linear measurement and variable size increments is to refer to it as a pitch of pixels. If you can’t relate to it. That’s your problem.

As for the rest of your crap… When someone figures out how to post a 428 megabyte image file (or a reasonable part of it) to the Internet and actually have it seen in a reasonable load time… Your idea might have some merit. Today it doesn’t.

It goes like this: My life, my choice. Go impose your control process on someone who actually cares what you have to say.

Happy now?

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