When to Upscale

[dabsond]

I currently use a 18MP Canon crop sensor body (Canon EOS 5Ti).  I normally shoot wildlife with a Tamron VC 70-300 lens.  Until I can save up for some longer glass I am doing a lot of cropping in.  Where in my workflow should I include upscaling my image.  should I upscale prior to the crop or wait and upscale the cropped image.  What would work best?  I use the Lightroom and PS so I could do it in either.  Thanks in advance for all the input.

Dan Dabson

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

... should I upscale prior to the crop or wait and upscale the cropped image...

I am sure some more knowledgeable forum members will correct me if wrong, but I think that is irrelevant.

What I think is a more legitimate question is whether to upscale before or after all other adjustments. One school of thought  would suggest to upscale the "virgin" file, before any adjustments, as upscaling algorithm would would work with the most "clean," original pixels.

I personally upscale at the end of all other adjustments, just when I am ready to send it for export. May not be the most theoretically appropriate approach, but it works nicely in practice for me.

[razrblck]

I enlarge after all edits as well (in Photoshop) so I can apply sharpening to the final image. Makes sense workflow wise saving up some time. As long as your result is what you want, shouldn't matter either way.

[Cem]

It also depends on the tool you use for upsizing. Tools such as Pro Photo Zoom, QImage, ImageMagick, ON1 Resize will give better results than the bicubic method of Photoshop. If you use the latter, you might consider looking into ImageMagick (which is free). There is a very useful thread in the forums about it including some scripts you can use right away.

Besides that, I would definitely do capture sharpening, chromatic aberration handling, lens corrections and noise reduction prior to enlarging. The output sharpening and the creative sharpening would be done after the upscaling. Some other adjustments such as general tonal controls don't matter much. If you use local contrast enhancements or clarity, it might be better to do them after upscaling.

Hope this helps.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

I currently use a 18MP Canon crop sensor body (Canon EOS 5Ti).  I normally shoot wildlife with a Tamron VC 70-300 lens.  Until I can save up for some longer glass I am doing a lot of cropping in.  Where in my workflow should I include upscaling my image.  should I upscale prior to the crop or wait and upscale the cropped image.  What would work best?  I use the Lightroom and PS so I could do it in either.  Thanks in advance for all the input.

Hi Dan,

Cropping will by itself not change the image, you'll just reduce the number of total pixels for post-processing. For the image adjustments, a good Raw processor may benefit from doing those while still in 'Raw mode'. Some enhancements may require exporting to a TIFF anyway. Lightroom's export upsampling is of decent quality, but there are other/better options available. So you could either export the cropped image to a larger output size with Lightroom or export at the original cropped size and use an additional upsampling application on that 16-bit/channel TIFF file.

The question is how large the exported image should be. Are you going to large printed output, or is it even necessary to upsample for monitor/display purposes?

Cheers,
Bart

[pearlstreet]

When we have larger photos printed, they want us to send them the file without enlarging and they do that. So this is obviously done after all edits are made and the results are great. So I always upsize last.

[dabsond]

Thanks to everyone for the input.