large prints from Canon 5DII file

[Chacaboy]

Hello,

I have a Canon 5D Mark II file a client would like printed at 40" on the long side. It has been cropped slightly, so 40" gives me a file that is 137 dpi. It's a super sharp image made with a Canon 17TSE, but what is the best printing solution. Do I leave it as is and print at 137, or do you have an up-res formula that will work better?

thanks in advance!

[Mark D Segal]

137 PPI, even for viewing at a distance good for a 40 inch print, is less than desirable. I would recommend nothing less than 180 PPI, and you can up-rez it in Photoshop using bicubic smoother. You may want to experiment with a crop of it on a letter size sheet first up-rezzed to 180 and then another to 240 and see which looks better. Several applications dedicated to resampling photos do exist (Such as ON1 Perfect Resize), so you could try one of them by downloading a trial to see whether they work better.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

If you'd print on canvas, 137 ppi is enough. But of course, just to be on the safe side, you can interpolate it as well, as Mark suggested. Apparently, the latest darling of the upsize crowd has been the Topaz AI Gigapixel.

[John Caldwell]

Suggest printing a small representative area with file as is, allowing LR to manage resolution. View that small print at representative distance. Compare alternate mean of upres. This is a good method, in my mind, of determining how far a file can be stretched.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

We are just obsessing too much.

I was in a National Geographic gallery the other day, and they have a 2m (almost 7 feet) wide image of a lion's head. The whiskers were visibly jagged when you come close to it.

[Mark D Segal]

We are just obsessing too much.

I was in a National Geographic gallery the other day, and they have a 2m (almost 7 feet) wide image of a lion's head. The whiskers were visibly jagged when you come close to it.

Or "we're" going too up-close to the print!  :-)

What was that saying (Bruce Fraser, if I remember correctly) - for a photographer the right viewing distance is at the front of your nose?

[BobShaw]

I have 900mm or 36" prints made with the 5DMk2. They look fine from a couple of metres away but are noticeably soft at less than a metre.
You can try resizing it and that may work depending on the subject.
It really completely depends on the requirements of the buyer. Obviously you won't sell it for a fortune unless it is a picture of a Yeti.

[John Hollenberg]

Depending on the subject matter, I found Topaz A.I. Gigapixel to do a much better job than other ways of uprezzing.  For a landscape image I tested on it did an amazing job.

[digitaldog]

If you'd print on canvas, 137 ppi is enough. But of course, just to be on the safe side, you can interpolate it as well, as Mark suggested. Apparently, the latest darling of the upsize crowd has been the Topaz AI Gigapixel.

I'm with Mark, 180 PPI is about the lowest value I'd go, then I'd interpolate to 180 PPI using Photoshop. Nothing more needed based on my own testing to output to actual Epson prints.
You have say a 72PPI image and you need to go huge, maybe another, expensive and slow product to do so. But for the OP, with good capture and output sharpening, Photoshop is all he needs.

[John Chardine]

If you feel you have to up-rez, and I would in your situation, I would recommend having a look at Topaz AI Gigapixel. I have tested it against Photoshop and it does a better job.

[Chacaboy]

Many thanks for all your responses. AI Gigapixel looks very promising, so I'm going to start testing it and see what it does. I'll get back to you with finals.  Thanks again!

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

I would prepare the image in Photoshop and scale to 180 PPI, or whatever your printer recommends, and sharpen the image using FocusMagic.

Best regards
Erik

Hello,

I have a Canon 5D Mark II file a client would like printed at 40" on the long side. It has been cropped slightly, so 40" gives me a file that is 137 dpi. It's a super sharp image made with a Canon 17TSE, but what is the best printing solution. Do I leave it as is and print at 137, or do you have an up-res formula that will work better?

thanks in advance!

[Mark D Segal]

If we're recommending sharpeners, my preference still remains Photokit Sharpener 2, which is now a free download from the Pixelgenius website. While it will not continue to be supported, I understand from an impeccable source that it is still compatible with all our current versions of Photoshop and operating systems. The manual is also excellent - a whole education on three-stage sharpening best practices. 

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Hi,

I would prepare the image in Photoshop and scale to 180 PPI, or whatever your printer recommends, and sharpen the image using FocusMagic.

Hi Erik,

While I agree about the usefulness of FocusMagic, after all I've been advocating its usefulness for (deconvolution) sharpening for a long time already and still do, do also check out Topaz A.I. Gigapixel (AIG). IMHO, so far nothing beats the quality of 'AIG' upscaled images for output.

Is it perfect? No, but it is already darned good, and will probably get even better with time. It's already usually better than other upsamplers that I have been recommending until now.

Iimage output that has been upscaled (it doesn't upsample in the traditional sense, it replaces) with AIG to the native printer driver's optimally required resolution (600/720 PPI) will look superior in most cases (from any distance). One might add a little tweak to an AIG upscaled image in the form of adding a little uniform noise, just to reduce the risk of posterization in the output (due to shortcomings in the 8-bit/channel output process, not of AIG's doing).

Cheers,
Bart

[deanwork]

If you are using an Epson printer ( you didn’t say) yes 180 ppi seems to be the sweet spot with good output sharpening added. But if you are on an HP or Canon I would suggest 150 before beginning to fake pixels. I’ve done that for 12 years with the thermal printers with careful sharpening and or noise reduction.

Bruce Fraser also said in Real World Camera Raw, - I have only one thing to say about interpolation, don’t do it. And, yes there have been numerous apps to deal with the image size situation since that book was written, ( I remember the horrors of the original, Genuine Fractals )  but I still try maintain that concept as much as I possibly can. I haven’t tried Topaz but every time I try one of these upres apps they seem to create as many problems as they solve. I am a big fan of QImage print layout software on a pc, but only if I’m sending files to it that have not been upsized, or as little as possible. We also have to consider that these various approaches are often image dependent and can look great on one file and less than desirable on another kind of file.

John

Hi Erik,

While I agree about the usefulness of FocusMagic, after all I've been advocating its usefulness for (deconvolution) sharpening for a long time already and still do, do also check out Topaz A.I. Gigapixel (AIG). IMHO, so far nothing beats the quality of 'AIG' upscaled images for output.

Is it perfect? No, but it is already darned good, and will probably get even better with time. It's already usually better than other upsamplers that I have been recommending until now.

Iimage output that has been upscaled (it doesn't upsample in the traditional sense, it replaces) with AIG to the native printer driver's optimally required resolution (600/720 PPI) will look superior in most cases (from any distance). One might add a little tweak to an AIG upscaled image in the form of adding a little uniform noise, just to reduce the risk of posterization in the output (due to shortcomings in the 8-bit/channel output process, not of AIG's doing).

Cheers,
Bart

[John Nollendorfs]

I find that increasing the resolution and basic sharpening is best done during RAW file processing. Simple one step process. If you are printing for a client, let them uprez it while converting from RAW. Like others have noted, using those uprezing programs have  their ups and downs. Frankly, printing nearly 20 years now, you are not going to see a hell of a lot of difference whether you spend time uprezing it in photoshop, or the stand alone programs versus just let the printer interpolate. I've found using Qimage with it's default out put sharpening and uprezing built in does a terrrific job, without wasting time worrying about it. Anyone not using Qimage in a production situation is really  missing the boat. My biggest beef with the program is the non-standard interface, and having to learn another program. For the price, in my book, it can't be beat!

[JeanMichel]

I fairly regularly make 20 by 30 inch prints from Canon 5d2, Leica M9 (18mp) and Leica MP (24 mp). I let LR do the upsizing magic. It all depends on how sharp one wants nose hairs to appear :-)

[John Nollendorfs]

 It all depends on how sharp one wants nose hairs to appear :-)

+1

[David Sutton]

My biggest beef with the program is the non-standard interface, and having to learn another program. For the price, in my book, it can't be beat!

If you have to read and re-read the manual to make it work, then the software is a failure IMHO. Qimage One has come out at much the same price but as dedicated print software with an understandable interface. Has a few small bugs but worked for me out of the box.
I don't think the output is any better than using a good uprez program, but it certainly saves a lot of mucking about.
David

[deanwork]

When you are talking about the large format printers and prints 30x40 on up I agree the printer interpolation does such a great job even sending the files over there at 150 to 180 ppi, and with QImage it’s even better. The printer drivers have gotten substantially better over the years that it’s taken a lot of the pain out of the whole situation. 



quote author=John Nollendorfs link=topic=127953.msg1082582#msg1082582 date=1544387775]
I find that increasing the resolution and basic sharpening is best done during RAW file processing. Simple one step process. If you are printing for a client, let them uprez it while converting from RAW. Like others have noted, using those uprezing programs have  their ups and downs. Frankly, printing nearly 20 years now, you are not going to see a hell of a lot of difference whether you spend time uprezing it in photoshop, or the stand alone programs versus just let the printer interpolate. I've found using Qimage with it's default out put sharpening and uprezing built in does a terrrific job, without wasting time worrying about it. Anyone not using Qimage in a production situation is really  missing the boat. My biggest beef with the program is the non-standard interface, and having to learn another program. For the price, in my book, it can't be beat!
[/quote]