Anyone tried the new Genuine Fractals 5 or BlowUp? What is the best of the new uprezing apps/plug-ins?

I've never used Blowup, but I do have Genuine Fractals 5.

I recently tried to blow up a really, really small photo, extracted from a PDF and only about 350KB in size and 200ppi, to print an A2. I found with GF5 I was getting really blocky output, very posterized, I know it was a big ask to blow such a small file. I was also getting a lot of out of gamut colours.

I wasn't happy at all with the output, and eventually I just used Photoshop's (CS3) own image resize option, with BiCubic smoother and up resampled to 300ppi. And that gave me near perfect results (as perfect as one could get with such a small file).

So, sorry I can't say I really recommend GF5, but then maybe I was asking too much of it with such a crappy file to start with, maybe with a better original it'll give better results then PS, but I haven't had a chance to try that yet.

Interested to hear what others have to say.

Qimage works for me, though I never try anything really extreme with it. But A4 prints from an old 3MP digicam are fine.

I just use bicubic smoother in CS3 (or CS2 or elements) and if it's a big blowup add a bit of grain. You can only goso far, but I'm often surprised at what looks aceptable. My bets was a 0.7Mp file from a P&S enlarged to 16 by 12 inches and printed on canvas. It was a sunset with little detail and the canvas hides a lot - I did have to be careful with the edges though as the P&S jpeg was way oversharpened for that size print.

Mike

I had been uprezzing with Bicubic Smoother with my 1DMikII files. That was OK up to 13x19 but when I started making 16x24, 20x30 and 24x36 inch prints the file sizes became unwieldy. However, I kept that workflow for a while because it gave me the option of using output sharpening suited to the media, resolution and printer-type.
I never found Genuine Fractals to be better than Bicubic Smoother.

More recently I have switched to up-interpolating on-the-fly using Hybrid Interpolation and Smart Sharpening in Qimage. SMart Sharpening is coordinated with output size and resolution, media type and printer type.

At worst, the prints up to 24x36 are equal in quality to my old way, and most often they are crisper and cleaner. The only "sharpening" I do now is what I consider to be Capture Sharpening using Focus Magic, which actually is a deconvolution program that eliminates the blur caused by demosaicking the image. Qimage takes care of the output sharpening.

Another vote for Qimage. The ability to uprez and sharpen is very convenient and the new sharpness equalizer with USM is clever. Its a print program but if you want to output a file that's fine too.

Heard a LOT of great stuff about Qimage... just wish there was something similar for the Mac!


uote=rdonson,Jan 30 2008, 06:08 PM]
Another vote for Qimage. The ability to uprez and sharpen is very convenient and the new sharpness equalizer with USM is clever. Its a print program but if you want to output a file that's fine too.

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If you have one of the Intel chip Macs you could process our files on the Mac side and print from the Windows side with Qimage.