Genuine Fractals.. any users here?

[JoeFriday]

http://www.ononesoftware.com/detail.php?prodLine_id=2

perhaps this isn't the crowd that would have much use for Genuine Fractals.. a PS plugin (or standalone program) that allegedly enlarges images to huge dimensions without serious loss of quality

just curious if anyone here has used it or seen actual samples of the results

 

[T_om]

Save your money.

I had GF not long after they came out paid for by a specific job. Not worth the outrageous money the client paid.

Get Qimage Pro and be happy. MUCH better algorithms and 1/10th the price.

http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/



Tom

 

[Stephanie Brim]

I agree, not worth the price. Haven't tried Tom's recommendation, though.

 

[kaiyen]

I've compared results from GFP and Qimage, and they seem about the same to me. That makes the latter quite a bargain in comparison.

I use Qimage for all of my image output needs, for work and personal use.

allan

 

[Jeff_S]

I had heard that a work around to one of these upsizing programs was to repeatedly increase the image dpi by small amounts, say 10 dpi at a time until you reach the desired number of pixels. does anyone have experience with this theory?

Jeff

 

[T_om]

I had heard that a work around to one of these upsizing programs was to repeatedly increase the image dpi by small amounts, say 10 dpi at a time until you reach the desired number of pixels. does anyone have experience with this theory?

Jeff

I have extensive experience with that technique. I even purchased a STAIR action and ran that to test it out.

It doesn't work.

By that I mean it doesn't produce output superior to PhotoShop's own Bicubic algorithms.

Qimage does.

Tom

 

[Byuphoto]

I have used Uppixel but have heard many good thing about Qimage and it will be coming to a theatre near me soon ;-)

 

[JoeFriday]

I had never heard of Qimage.. I'll definitely check it out.. thanks, guys!

 

[saxshooter]

Fred Miranda's Stair Interpolation is what I use. The first version was freeware, if I'm not mistaken. It is a Photoshop action and works very well. Not sure about current versions, it may be a plug-in. But I am not using it for printing, rather to upsize an image after cropping into the frame.

 

[daveozzz]

I think GF is pretty impressive - I've never uprezed by huge amounts but always been very pleased with the results from what I have done. Then again I've never used anything else so can't compare it.

 

[Hibbs]

Another cople to look at are Extensis PixelSmart and Photozoom Pro

 

[normjackson]

I guess QImage is to printing what Vuescan is to scanning : low priced, powerful, essentially one man's baby (Mike Chaney). The interpolation ability it has (on a par with expensive specialist products) represents a small part of the product which is essentially aimed at quality and versatility in printing. The downside of all this power is that, like Vuescan only more so, it might need some time to get the hang of. Definitely worth it if you intend to do a lot of good quality home printing and will make use of its versatility. If you have probelms, Mike Chaney has a Qimage support forum at stevesforums :
http://www.stevesforums.com/forums/view_forum.php?id=33
In a thread at dpreview here's Mike's views on interpolation as part of the bigger equation :
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1003&message=16430259

The other products mentioned only offer interpolation except GF which offers its own compression algorithm. Genuine Fractals is the "bees knees" for interpolating Foveon sensor pictures because it is so good at removing jaggies. Maybe its price is a bit out of step with newer offerings though. Photozoom Pro gives excellent results and is easy to use but again is perhaps a bit pricey for amateur use. Users with Photoshop CS onwards seem to be generally happy with the newer resizing options available within that. IrfanView (made available by the author for no charge) offers a reasonable quality Lanczos interpolation. Mind you, seems to me the sharpening generally employed after interpolation can easily have greater impact on final results than the choice of interpolation algorithm.

 

[JoeFriday]

very informative, norm... thanks for the summary

 

[shaaktiman]

I have GP. It's not the greatest, it tends to give the photo a kind of watercolor filter effect. It's not "better" than the normal blurry photoshop upsizing result, just different. It is acceptable if you have a decently high dpi to start with but if you want to print web images or something like that it doesn't work well.

As far as upsizing by tiny increments, this USED to work OK on older versions of psd. Now it is no longer necessary. Bicubic gives you the same end result. For upsizing you're supposed to use "bicubic smoother" and for downsizing "bicubic sharper" but I usually just do plain bicubic.