Photoshop upsizing....WTF!

[Nevik]

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So I'm wondering which camera do I need to travel light,  I have topline Canons and a Pentax K1 at the moment, plus countless film cameras. If I wanted to travel with just one camera what would I get?

I'm not a pixel peeper, my reasoning being photography like painting and drawing is an illusion. You take a 3D World and compress it down to a 2D  likeness, certainly with photography as long as the mechanics don't become ugly and spoil the trick it works just fine. No one stands in a field watching a Sunset and counts how many blades of grass they can see or trees on the hillside, you just look at the scene and go wow. 

I use to buy special programs to upsize images, it could take forever to process and there were limits before the trick became obvious and the illusion became tardy. 

So the other day I opened light room with the intention of seeing what I could expect from a 8meg crop of a 1DX file, the reason being that is what a 50mm crop on a Leica Q gives you. So I cropped a Canon 1Dx file in LR to approx a 8meg size, exported it as a tiff, then opened in Photoshop. Then I resized to like a 15 x 12 inch, viewed at 100 %, then tried to figure out where I had gone wrong, it was way too good for a upsized image, really it was. So I kept trying different images even a crop from a Sony pont and shoot I once owned (left it in a hire car) I took it up to 40inches........now this is getting ridiculous just stupidly ridiculous , it looked great, beyond belief. Whats going on here I'm thinking,  again I took a shot from the 1DX with 24mm mkII lens of a coffee shop interior, cropped and upsized to 50 inches, hairs on  heads were sharp at 100%......

My conclusion is if the original is clean and sharp you can almost dial in any number you want and the image still hides the illusion, it still works very well, you don't see the slight of hand or trap door, no excuses needed about viewing distance etc it works, it works beyond belief in the latest Photoshop. Leica Q it is then.....or maybe a CL even.

 

Kev.

Edited October 22, 2018 by Nevik

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[adan]

Yes, Photoshop CC does promote its "Intelligent Upsampling" - which may well be the same algorithms you used to use in "special programs," purchased from the developers by Adobe (they do a lot of  "checkbook R&D," including buying PhotoShop itself from the Knoll brothers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Adobe_Systems ).

And it is not as though 8 Mpixels itself is "small" - 6-8 Mpixels (Canon 20D) was about the tipping point where the exodus from film went into high gear.

Of course, start with the ~0.5 Mpixel jpeg images we get to post here on the forum, and you may find the ceiling a bit lower.

 

 

[jmahto]

On 10/22/2018 at 10:00 AM, Nevik said:

So I'm wondering which camera do I need to travel light,  I have topline Canons and a Pentax K1 at the moment, plus countless film cameras. If I wanted to travel with just one camera what would I get?

I'm not a pixel peeper, my reasoning being photography like painting and drawing is an illusion. You take a 3D World and compress it down to a 2D  likeness, certainly with photography as long as the mechanics don't become ugly and spoil the trick it works just fine. No one stands in a field watching a Sunset and counts how many blades of grass they can see or trees on the hillside, you just look at the scene and go wow. 

I use to buy special programs to upsize images, it could take forever to process and there were limits before the trick became obvious and the illusion became tardy. 

So the other day I opened light room with the intention of seeing what I could expect from a 8meg crop of a 1DX file, the reason being that is what a 50mm crop on a Leica Q gives you. So I cropped a Canon 1Dx file in LR to approx a 8meg size, exported it as a tiff, then opened in Photoshop. Then I resized to like a 15 x 12 inch, viewed at 100 %, then tried to figure out where I had gone wrong, it was way too good for a upsized image, really it was. So I kept trying different images even a crop from a Sony pont and shoot I once owned (left it in a hire car) I took it up to 40inches........now this is getting ridiculous just stupidly ridiculous , it looked great, beyond belief. Whats going on here I'm thinking,  again I took a shot from the 1DX with 24mm mkII lens of a coffee shop interior, cropped and upsized to 50 inches, hairs on  heads were sharp at 100%......

My conclusion is if the original is clean and sharp you can almost dial in any number you want and the image still hides the illusion, it still works very well, you don't see the slight of hand or trap door, no excuses needed about viewing distance etc it works, it works beyond belief in the latest Photoshop. Leica Q it is then.....or maybe a CL even.

 

Kev.

Upsizing does work wonderful with right algorithm but the difference is visible if you compare it with native file. Whether that matters on the final output size (print or monitor) is another matter. 

[erudolph]

Topaz AI Gigapixel, a simple, black-box upsizing application, produces some excellent results.  Worth looking at.