"My opinion was that GF was slightly better than Bicubic Sharper and Photozoom my favorite by far. The S-spline algorithm gave superior results in my estimation."
I just did a test with all three methods and found Photozoom to give me better results also.
Tested above apps myself and Photozoom was the winner.
D Ross are you printing the image yourself or are you having a printing company do the mural? If a third party is printing usually their rips have excellent interpolation and only need the native file.
Here’s how I rank them:
1 – Genuine Fractals. It does a very smooth and believable job. 2 – PSCS2 Bicubic Smoother. Also excellent. But GF has the edge (no pun intended!) 3 – PhotoZoom S-Spline. Awful. The result looks totally plastic, not at all photographic.
Rick,
When you determined your rankings was there any trend in terms of original size to final size, e.g. did you start with a 5 x 7 300 dpi and scaled to 15 x 21 at 300dpi or only 10 x 14?
What I’m asking ia at what point in scaling up to you begin to notice a difference between softwares that will also be noticeable when screened?
alan
Actually, I did this months ago (the post was resurrected yesterday). I used GF from within PS9, and it came out really well. I’ll be back to this discussion for the next time as I did not try Photozoom. The PS Bicubic smoother I did try out and it did not look as good as the GF solution/filter from within PS.
at what point in scaling up to you begin to notice a difference between softwares that will also be noticeable when screened?
I didn’t do an exhaustive test comparing the results st 200%, 300%, 400%, etc. My assumption is that for everything up to 200% or even 300%, Bicubic Smoother will be as good as GF in a practical sense. For me, the need for exceptional interpolating comes in at 300% and greater. My tests were at 300% and 500%. The "look and feel" of the S-Spline result was the same at both settings – in my opinion, fairly ugly.
