frankbernhard Posted October 20, 2009 Share #21 Posted October 20, 2009 Advertisement (gone after registration) Size really should depend on what you, the artist, want to do / say and what the image is good at... Absolutely, and also the framing changes the way someone’s looking at your pictures. You should know what a special style implies. Both a Candida Höfer c-print behind bulletproof glass, framed in oak and a roughly pinned Tillmans inkjetprint could fit perfect. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advertisement Posted October 20, 2009 Posted October 20, 2009 Hi frankbernhard, Take a look here How big of a print have you made?. I'm sure you'll find what you were looking for!
buckhorn_cortez Posted October 21, 2009 Share #22 Posted October 21, 2009 Dear Andy, what would happen according to you if we were printing bigger then A3? The 300 dpi idea is really a myth. Today's high'end inkjet printers can easily have an 180 dpi sent to. The printer takes care of the rest. You have no idea about quality if you think the printer driver will handle upsizing. The printer driver will give stair stepped edges. Printer drivers do: paper advance, head positioning, and dithering. They do not do interpolation - they're not made to do that. Bicubic smoother in PS is a very poor method. The "smoother" portion interpolates a fill-in for the stair steps found in the crude printer driver method. However, it's downfall is that it kills edge sharpness. In the process of transitioning between areas of color it fades the edge in 3-4 pixels to the next color. This does two things: 1. makes the image edges less sharp. 2. destroys detail because the "smoother" 3-4 pixel transition also smooths out the details or textures as it blends colors together. There is another way to uprez in most RAW developers which is to change the resolution or output size prior to processing from RAW to TIFF. In Capture One it is done in the "Process" portion by setting one of the image side measurements to the final output size. There are two problems with this method: 1. the file size becomes large making it unwieldy to manipulate the image in PS if you duplicate the base layer for processing. 2: there are still stair stepped edges. Of all of the software I've tried to date (6 in all) - Qimage results in the best final image without jagged edges, loss of detail, and loss of edge sharpness. If you insist on using inferior methods - that's fine, but until you've tried a number of different methods and tested a number of interpolation software packages, don't believe you have found the best method. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
buckhorn_cortez Posted October 21, 2009 Share #23 Posted October 21, 2009 What about Genuine Fracals 6? Is this an option? And please explain why 300dpi is a myth. I've heard that before but I don't understand it. When printing for a Gallery should I size as standard photographic sizes or use digital sizes? I know some Galleries prefer film sizes. Genuine Fractals invents shapes because of the way it works. For example, if you have, lets say - three branches crossing making a small triangle, it sees a "shape." So, instead of having three branches crossing, you have a triangle, rhombus, dodecahedron - whatever shape it wants to invent for that area. You won't see that on every image - it's sort of a hit-and-miss effect...so if you feel lucky...use Genuine Fractals. Highly overated software in my opinion. The 300 dpi: Okay. Printers have a "native resolution." For Epson professional printers it is 720 dpi. For Canon and HP printers it is 600 dpi. If you feed the printer data at a multiple of that (240, 360, for Epson or 300 for HP and Canon) you are trying to keep the printer out of the total raster recalculation of the image and need to interpolate the entire image from one resolution to another. You get less artifacts and somewhat better sharpness (only visible on really big prints - like above 16-inch short side measurement). But it is real. Not visible to everyone, but then not everyone looks carefully at prints and are more than glad that the image was just printed big. What Qimage does is interpolate the image to the native format resolution of the chosen printer prior to sending the printer driver the file. This keeps the printer driver totally out of the interpolation business and only makes it dither, advance the paper, and control the head (position and ink droplet size). What a RIP does is get the printer driver out of the printing business completely. The RIP controls everything from interpolation to inking giving total printer control above and beyond what a printer driver can do - including advanced dithering algorithms that provide better tonal control and finer resolution. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
mwalker649 Posted October 21, 2009 Author Share #24 Posted October 21, 2009 Qimage doesn't run on a mac. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
haroldp Posted October 21, 2009 Share #25 Posted October 21, 2009 I run Qimage in a Windows (XP Pro 32) guest machine under parallels 4 (VM) on a Mac every day, driving a network attached HP3100-24. Windows runs more reliably as a virtual machine, than native because the VM environment shields the hardware from Windows. I do not have the skills to run a RIP to advantage, but Qimage gives the best print output I have seen short of that, and is very approachable. ( and cheap ). I have it configured to automatically interpolate to 600 dpi based on final print size which appears to me to work very well on the HP. The Windows (XP Pro 32) guest machine under parallels 4 environment is a minor nuisance but I put up with it because Qimage is such a valuable tool to me. Regards ... Harold Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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