up-sizing, up-ressing, from the sublime to the ridiculous

[Peter Barnes]

I am one of a group of photographers who won a commission to supply photographs of the local landscape to be used as part of the interior design of the large new hospital being built in our city. Some of the photographs are to end up as murals, printed on film and applied in sheets to walls - the largest is 8 by 2 metres (26 feet x 6 feet) and it is to go in a 3 metre wide corridor! 

Part of our brief is to supply print-ready files. We are told the final resolution required is 150ppi. There is a local professional photo lab that has proved it can up size files to this magnitude with high quality results - the method used is to resample in 1% increments and check the file for artefacts and problems regularly during the process.  This is obviously very labour and machine intensive when increasing the size of a file from 5000 pixels wide to about 45000 pixels wide.   And in the lead up to Xmas they haven't the capacity to do this for us to meet our end-December deadline. 

I've read the discussions I can find here on the topic, one is way too technical for this little black duck, the other referred to an article by Jeff Schewe which turned out to be written in 2007 and didn't really address our issue.

Can anybody point me to some online resources, or an experienced expert in this area who could advise, or a service with the ability to prepare the files for us?

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

I am one of a group of photographers who won a commission to supply photographs of the local landscape to be used as part of the interior design of the large new hospital being built in our city. Some of the photographs are to end up as murals, printed on film and applied in sheets to walls - the largest is 8 by 2 metres (26 feet x 6 feet) and it is to go in a 3 metre wide corridor! 

Part of our brief is to supply print-ready files. We are told the final resolution required is 150ppi. There is a local professional photo lab that has proved it can up size files to this magnitude with high quality results - the method used is to resample in 1% increments and check the file for artefacts and problems regularly during the process.  This is obviously very labour and machine intensive when increasing the size of a file from 5000 pixels wide to about 45000 pixels wide.   And in the lead up to Xmas they haven't the capacity to do this for us to meet our end-December deadline. 

I've read the discussions I can find here on the topic, one is way too technical for this little black duck, the other referred to an article by Jeff Schewe which turned out to be written in 2007 and didn't really address our issue.

Can anybody point me to some online resources, or an experienced expert in this area who could advise, or a service with the ability to prepare the files for us?

Hi Peter,

Depending on the subject matter, you can do it yourself without too much trouble. PhotoZoom Pro by Benvista does a tremendous job of keeping sharp edge detail sharp (sharper than the original edges are wide when simply magnified), and not posterize smooth gradients. Perfect Resize by OnOne also does a good job, but is a bit more prone to create posterization or funky edges when pushed to the extreme. As a general upsizer, Lightroom is quite decent (better than Photoshop), but results are not as sharp as from the other two I mentioned.

Both have free trial versions that work as a Photoshop automation plugin or as a standalone application.

Cheers,
Bart

[Jim Kasson]

I am one of a group of photographers who won a commission to supply photographs of the local landscape to be used as part of the interior design of the large new hospital being built in our city. Some of the photographs are to end up as murals, printed on film and applied in sheets to walls - the largest is 8 by 2 metres (26 feet x 6 feet) and it is to go in a 3 metre wide corridor! 

Part of our brief is to supply print-ready files. We are told the final resolution required is 150ppi. There is a local professional photo lab that has proved it can up size files to this magnitude with high quality results - the method used is to resample in 1% increments and check the file for artefacts and problems regularly during the process.  This is obviously very labour and machine intensive when increasing the size of a file from 5000 pixels wide to about 45000 pixels wide.   And in the lead up to Xmas they haven't the capacity to do this for us to meet our end-December deadline. 

I think Bart steered you right above. However, these upsizing algorithms, good as they are, can't actually create new information. If you have time to make the captures between now and when the images are due, may I suggest stitched panoramas?  It should be easy to get images 25000 pixels wide, and then your upsizing will only be a factor of two.  If you want to make lots of captures, you could even go to 45000 pixels wide in native resolution. I use Auotpano Giga, but there are several good stitching programs.

Jim

[Ray R]

Another one to consider, if you are using Windows, is Qimage.

http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage-u/index.html

There is a 14 day demo, which I think prints a watermark, but you could see what the final result is.

I have nothing to do with Qimage, but tend to use it for printing all my images.