If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. With 2MP at
24x30, you'd better be standing in the middle of the room.
I've used CS3's bicubic, Fred Miranda's, Genuine Fractals, and Qimage.
For what it's worth, my experimentation shows:
Qimage is wonderful for anything up to about 11x14. I noticed when I
went to true 16x20 prints, Genuine Fractals was noticeably better
than Qimage. That said, I use Qimage extensively to print smaller
sizes. It's one pretty damn nice program, and worth every penny of
the $80 or so it costs.
My sense is that CS3's bicubic is better than CS2's, but my eyes will
be 59 years old in October, so your mileage may vary. Lately I've
been lazy, and have bumped E-1 4.9MP files up to 11x15 using Bicubic
Smoother and they've looked just fine. I used to use Genuine Fractals
for that, but frankly, I can't tell the difference for the amount of
work involved. Now that I'm shooting with an E-510, which has a
native file size of roughly 11x14, I find myself downsizing more than
I used to, and for the most part I use CS3's Bicubic Sharper with
excellent results. Same is true for Qimage, going up or down. I sell
a lot of 3x5s matted to 5x7, and I use Qimage exclusively to print
those. It does a super job.
So basically, Fred Miranda has fallen by the wayside. But the price
is right, and if you don't do that much uprezzing to bigger sizes, FM
will probably work just fine.
And don't forget Picture Window Pro, which has a Layout feature that
is basically a printer RIP built right into the software. Before I
went to Photoshop, I used PWP's Layout exclusively. I would scan my
film at the highest resolution possible, and then let PWP uprez as
needed for whatever print size I was doing. Sure was neater than
having a hard drive littered with various sizes of prints. <g>
Again, information worth every penny you paid for it.
--Bob Whitmire
www.bwp33.com
On Aug 12, 2007, at 9:34 AM, Richard Ociepka wrote:
> "If Fred Miranda's Stair Interpolation plugin works as advertised, you
> can blow up an image 300% while keeping the quality...that should
> mean you can print a good 24x30" print from a 2 MP camera."
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