Does Anyone Use Genuine Fractals?

T

tedwhite

Guest
I have a chance to purchase the above (Version 6) for $79USD. It's claim is that it allows you to make enlargements without losing sharpness or detail.

Has anyone experience with this?

Ted
 
Yes. I purchased and used GenFrac for one project, involving odd images that were originally quite low resolution. For this particular project, GenFrac seemed to add some weird artifacts -- sort of like 3d triangular surfaces. Normal PhotoShop upscaling gave better results. However, this may have been because of the particular image set, or because I did not experiment enough with all the settings in GenFrac.

It would probably be an entirely different situation if you had acceptable source material from the start, and wanted to upscale REALLY BIG, like 10x.
 
I think it's called perfect resize now. I plan to try the trial version (leaves a watermark) when I get some 13x19 paper, and if it works well, maybe buy it, as I have a lot of images scanned in med. to low res.
 
I used and liked it when I use to shoot digital. The version used is now about three or four years old. It worked as advertised.
 
tedwhite said:
I have a chance to purchase the above (Version 6) for $79USD. It's claim is that it allows you to make enlargements without losing sharpness or detail.

Has anyone experience with this?
Click to expand...

As a matter of fact, it is pretty hard to devise a enlarging method that will lose sharpness or detail. Genuine Fractals' claim was that it would add detail. Which it unfortunately does - in a unconvincing and strange manner on the pictures I tried.

I is supposed to work well to rescale unsharp backgrounds for composites, and it supposedly is tuned to play nice with portraits, but as a generic blow-up tool for photography it is of rather limited usefulness. But you could try yourself - as I said, YMMV with the subject matter, and there is (or used to be) a demo version.
 
I've used GF for years, currently use the latest version.

I've had great success with the program. Has worked for me MUCH better than resizing in Photoshop. Almost miraculous in many cases.

Unless you are going REALLY big, though, I'm not sure it's really needed as much anymore. Most modern cameras have sufficient resolution to make pretty big prints with just Photoshop. Back when the Canon D30 was hot stuff with 3MP, GF could really work miracles rezing up my files!
 
Thanks, everyone, for the input. In the Academic Superstore catalog I got a few days ago it's still called Genuine Fractals 6.

Maybe I really don't need it after all as my printer's max size is 13x19 inches and I'm now using a 14 megapixel DSLR (Pentax K20D). I guess the thing to do - and I haven't done it yet - is to make a 13x19 and see how it holds up before spending money for GF6.

The thought of GF adding weird stuff is a bit off-putting.

Ted
 
I have 13x19 on the wall, scanned with V300 from 35mm Ilford Pan 400, bit cropped and it looks ok. 14mp will do the job, Better Buy Beer.
 
If anyone can add information that's not there in the first place, they will certainly win a Nobel Prize.

How can you know what was there if you weren't able to record it? All you can do is guess at what the real, but unknown information content was. Upsizing programs do not add information, they only estimate what data would be present based on the adjacent data that actually was present.

All upsizing programs make guesses at what information would be there if it was recorded in the first place. Some make guesses much better than others do. User defined parameters can increase or decrease the quality of the estimates. In the end the added information is only an estimate of something you can not know.

The less unique information contained in the image, the easier it is to make a good guess. For instance an image of a foggy seascape with lots of sky does not contain as much unique information as an image of a city skyline on a clear day with practically no sky. The less you upsize, the easier it is to make good guesses. The viewing distance from the final print matters too. That is the form of the final analog output is relevant.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom