tacit wrote:
The only valid "test" is this: make two images, from the same source under the same light, one at a high resolution and one at a low resolution. Print both side by side, and see which contains more detail.
What are you talking about Tacit?
Are you seriously trying to say an optical enlargement from a film – any film will have more detail than the film itself? I would even dispute a contact print having as much detail as the film it was made from but you would never see the loss with your eyes.
And what of the pre-press industry? Do they expect to get twice as much detail in their camera ready art as the photographer who supplied the photos for it? I think I saw a pre-press guy once. He had a loupe super glued on his right eye. Claimed he could see detail even the press it was destined for couldn’t produce but he just had to have detail… So he thought.
To listen to you and Johan is an exercise in contradiction. The already established base for measuring the quality of an enlargement is the quality you can get from a traditional film enlargement, using traditional optical or even advanced digital photographic equipment.
You and Johan seem very willing to side step many things and introduce bullshit to conceal your preposterous stand in this issue. You (and Johan it seems) are no longer willing to accept an enlargement with as much detail as the original, now you expect it have more.
Your holy attitude is best left for Sundays. If a line is 2 points wide in the original, and that original gets enlarged by a factor of 5, how wide is the line in the enlarged picture, if it is to be the proportionally enlarged line?
If it is to have no more detail then it will break up and disapear as the enlargement grows. Images are not elastic, you know? If it is to maintain it’s appearance as "not lost any detail" then it has to have had detail added to it or it would disapear as it got larger. You simply cannot enlarge a digital image without adding detail to it.
Johan’s suggestion that adding detail should mean inventing extra information in the image where none was in the first place is just a smoke screen better left for CSI and the movie makers.
You can’t enlarge a film without loss of detail yet Johan – himself a user of large format printers and interpolation routines has just said: "not that you cannot interpolate an image without LOOSING quality". So that’s it then.
The jury of peers has made their judgment without ever seeing a single result. How can I argue with such Continental logic? If the line in the question grows in any direction, it must contain more detail than the original or simply vanish.
You seem to think increasing a file size by a factor of 10 does not in itself increase the detail of an image yet in order to *NOT* lose any detail, you have to add some. Sure, it is derived from a near neighbor calculation – even a guess based on mathematical probability but none the less, detail has to be added in order not to lose any in a visual examination, as the image grows. And when you use the math in reverse on an enlarged image, it increases it’s sharpness and perceived detail so a reduced image actually shows a sharper picture than the original.
You still persist in your relentless crusade despite being offered proof – which you don’t want because if *YOU* can’t do it , nobody can, right? Mindless followers of ancient beliefs… It’s what brought Germany down, you know?
When you start to claim adding elements of a picture which were never there in the original is adding detail you are not talking about bits and bytes, you are talking about making up for poor composure, poor focus and other image faults and of cause this can never happen but adding detail to the existing information is essential to the enlargement of it.
