Posted by Carroll Breaux on September 5, 2008 at 9:45 AM
Is anyone out there using a program like Genuine Fractal. What are the advantages for avian and wildlife photography. What are the capabilities? Your thoughts please.
Posted by Richard Lee on September 5, 2008 at 11:23 AM
Carroll, that's an interesting and timely question for me as well.. I downloaded the demo version yesterday and it looks very promising.
The reason for my interest in Genuine Fractals is as follows: I recently received a request to use one of my photos in a book on the Big Thicket here in East Texas. Unfortunately, the photo was taken with the first digital camera I owned a Sony Mavica with a very low resolution ~1 megapixal. My first reaction was to tell the requestor, sorry it just won't yield a usable print even at 3x5in.
The picture is of a cypress swamp in an early morning fog, so even though a color photo, it looks like a B&W image and is soft because of the fog. Because the requestor really liked the mysterious nature of the photo he asked me to try to get a usable copy. I tried Adobe CS3's resize process and ended up with a highly pixalated mess.
In my frist attempt with the Genuine Fractals demo, I believe I have managed a very good 4x3in. print at 240ppi.
Now I want to work with a few of my bird photos (some one-shot lifers) that were too far away even with my 600mm lens to give a decent 8x10. If Genuine Fractals can produce a decent print from a significant crop of the original they will definitely make a sale.
Try the demo, they let you use it for thirty days free.
I'll speak up from the dark side. I started with GF about a month before Mac moved to OSX. Had to move to OSX for reasons not related to GF, but there was no basic upgrade available, free or cheap. GF said tuff luck, dump your buxx on a new full version. I don't know what it costs now, but if I recall correctly it was close to $150 back then. I was hot, to say the least. I stewed well and thoroughly for the months it took me to go back and convert all my accumulated GF files to a format I could use with other programs. I'm not slamming GF so much as warning you against getting into some proprietary file system that can only be read by a single program. If today's CS will read the GF files without the help of the GF program, fine. If not, think twice.
Posted by David Bostedo on September 5, 2008 at 12:54 PM
Carroll - Here's some links to a three part comparison of Genuine Fractals, Alien Skin's BlowUp, and Bicubic in PS :
I've demo'ed GF myself, and I'd say that unless you're really picky, the algorithms in PS work awfully well. Another option to try is the Lanzcos algorithm, which isn't available in PS (at least, not Elements, which I have) but is available in the free IrfanView program. I've resized a few things that way and gotten better results than I did with Bicubic.
Posted by Greg Cope on September 5, 2008 at 2:08 PM
I've only demo'd Genuine Fractals, so this is from limited experience...but here goes. Testing it on several different images compared to Bicubic Smoother and other basic photoshop algorithms, I'd say I didn't really begin to see a difference until I enlarged images on average >300%. Of course it was image dependent, some images I couldn't really see a difference at 400%, whereas others I could see at 250%. At the time, I didn't expect to interpolate great than 250%, so it wasn't worth it in my mind to spend the dough. YMMV of course.
Posted by Jerry Greer on September 7, 2008 at 12:42 PM
I've had a wonderful experience with GF 5.0. It blows bicubic smother away and I feel that it takes my images to the level of scanned 6x7cm. I think that Guy has had the same experience also. It does take a little learning though and I've alway used the advanced process. I wouldn;t have a problem doing 24" to 30" (on the short side) images with my 5D. Awesome program! BTW, I was able to upgrade from version 3 with no problems.
Posted by David Bostedo on September 7, 2008 at 5:12 PM
I think Jerry pointed out something that could be important here : the quality of the file you're starting with. In my case, I'm starting with 5 MPixel small sensor images. Blowing these up even moderate amounts (2X) creates problems that all of the different methods don't do so great with. Perhaps with very high quality starting files (which Jerry would have from his 5D) something like GF becomes more of an advantage. I don't really know though, this is just speculation...
Posted by Jerry Greer on September 8, 2008 at 9:17 AM
David,
You hit the nail on the head! GF is somewhat emulating neighboring pixels to increase the size of the image. The higher the quality of the pixel coupled with the number of pixels makes a big difference. I've done numerous tests with 40" pints and GF wins hands down over bicubic smoother. It's shocking of the detail difference.
Discussion
7 repliesThe reason for my interest in Genuine Fractals is as follows: I recently received a request to use one of my photos in a book on the Big Thicket here in East Texas. Unfortunately, the photo was taken with the first digital camera I owned a Sony Mavica with a very low resolution ~1 megapixal. My first reaction was to tell the requestor, sorry it just won't yield a usable print even at 3x5in.
The picture is of a cypress swamp in an early morning fog, so even though a color photo, it looks like a B&W image and is soft because of the fog. Because the requestor really liked the mysterious nature of the photo he asked me to try to get a usable copy. I tried Adobe CS3's resize process and ended up with a highly pixalated mess.
In my frist attempt with the Genuine Fractals demo, I believe I have managed a very good 4x3in. print at 240ppi.
Now I want to work with a few of my bird photos (some one-shot lifers) that were too far away even with my 600mm lens to give a decent 8x10. If Genuine Fractals can produce a decent print from a significant crop of the original they will definitely make a sale.
Try the demo, they let you use it for thirty days free.
Hope this helps?
Dick Lee
Part I
Part II
Part III
I've demo'ed GF myself, and I'd say that unless you're really picky, the algorithms in PS work awfully well. Another option to try is the Lanzcos algorithm, which isn't available in PS (at least, not Elements, which I have) but is available in the free IrfanView program. I've resized a few things that way and gotten better results than I did with Bicubic.
You hit the nail on the head! GF is somewhat emulating neighboring pixels to increase the size of the image. The higher the quality of the pixel coupled with the number of pixels makes a big difference. I've done numerous tests with 40" pints and GF wins hands down over bicubic smoother. It's shocking of the detail difference.