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Think I asked this before but can't find the thread.

I have a design I want to enlarge to get printed out - previous run of prints came out well but the enlarged one didn't seem as sharp and well defined.

I understand there are different ways to achieve this but what I wanted to ask initially was: Is it better to enlarge different elements separately or just the whole image in one go?

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It would help to know if your design is all pixel layers, all vector layers, a mix of both, etc.

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7 hours ago, R C-R said:

It would help to know if your design is all pixel layers, all vector layers, a mix of both, etc.

Well it's not going to be all vector is it?

Vector and Pixel.

I've been meaning to merge all the pixel layers in this design actually, tidy it up a bit - unless I don't need to and there's a simple way to achieve good results.

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6 hours ago, awakenedbyowls said:

I've been meaning to merge all the pixel layers in this design actually, tidy it up a bit - unless I don't need to and there's a simple way to achieve good results.

To achieve increased resolution of these layers? – Wouldn't work, not for pixel layers. Can work for image layers in case they have pixel dimensions larger then their placed size.

The easiest would be to increase the output resolution and get pixel content resampled on export. Aside increased DPI you also may choose between various resampling methods. The menu lists them by contour contrast intensity (sharpness).

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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37 minutes ago, awakenedbyowls said:

No just to minimise the number of layers I have to perform whatever operation on - ended up with a lot of pixel layers on top of each other on this design. 

This wouldn't influence / improve the desired output resolution (but might increase export speed only). What you want is upscaling + resampling. For this you need to increase the resolution (with a different resampler than "Nearest Neighbour").

If such a result feels insufficient for your needs you could try resampling with an external app specialized for upscaling (e.g. Topaz Gigapixel AI). However, upscaling will hardly achieve the same quality (sharpness) like a natively higher resolution of the used material would do. It "just" creates additional pixels, calculated with values between the existing pixels. If an external app gets used on your entire layout (export) it would cause unwanted rasterization to vector elements. Thus it is more useful to use that for the single pixel layers in your Affinity document before exporting the layout. In that case it might help to reduce the number of pixel layers to reduce the number of layers which needs to get upscaled and replaced in the layout before export.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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4 hours ago, thomaso said:

This wouldn't influence / improve the desired output resolution (but might increase export speed only). What you want is upscaling + resampling. For this you need to increase the resolution (with a different resampler than "Nearest Neighbour").

If such a result feels insufficient for your needs you could try resampling with an external app specialized for upscaling (e.g. Topaz Gigapixel AI). However, upscaling will hardly achieve the same quality (sharpness) like a natively higher resolution of the used material would do. It "just" creates additional pixels, calculated with values between the existing pixels. If an external app gets used on your entire layout (export) it would cause unwanted rasterization to vector elements. Thus it is more useful to use that for the single pixel layers in your Affinity document before exporting the layout. In that case it might help to reduce the number of pixel layers to reduce the number of layers which needs to get upscaled and replaced in the layout before export.

You haven't seen how untidy my layers can become. Keeping the cogs moving on any upscaling operations is my main reason for merging pixel layers - I don't see what the issue is with that specifically. It's done (because I forgot I already did it before). It's done.

Remind me please, I'm a bit rusty do I do this through Document Setup - I can't remember?

Edit: I figured it out - didn't see I have to select Rescale so I'm playing around with that - seemed to worked really quickly on all the layers and looks alright?

I'm looking to upscale a design from 3000x2000px to 4500x3000px - basically a 50% increase so I'm figuring this should probably be suffice for my purposes and hopefully print out better than adding the 3000x2000px image to a 4500x3000px canvas and just enlarging it to fit using the Transform tool?

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21 hours ago, awakenedbyowls said:

Think I asked this before but can't find the thread.

I have a design I want to enlarge to get printed out - previous run of prints came out well but the enlarged one didn't seem as sharp and well defined.

I understand there are different ways to achieve this but what I wanted to ask initially was: Is it better to enlarge different elements separately or just the whole image in one go?

There are many roads to Rome, and you should probably google 'output sharpening' and 'enlarge for print' - especially output sharpening.

But I must mention Topaz Gigapixel, which is not the solution to everything that needs enlarging, but which has changed my relationship to size altogether in many contexts.

Gigapixel AI (topazlabs.com)

10 Reasons Why Strategic Plans Fail
Having a plan simply for plans sake - Not understanding the environment or focusing on results - Partial commitment - Not having the right people involved - Writing the plan and putting it on the shelf - Unwillingness or inability to change - Having the wrong people in leadership positions - No accountability or follow through - Unrealistic goals or lack of focus and resources.

Get it?

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Looked into this some time ago

have a read at this article

https://topten.ai/image-upscalers-review/

But also there is a free one on GitHub.. that used to be popular
https://github.com/AaronFeng753/Waifu2x-Extension-GUI

and

https://vanceai.com/anime-upscaler/?source=ttai_waifu2x
 

and GIMP apparently (not tried!)

 

There was also this but is PSD here but I am sure it could be adapted

 

Affinity Version 1 (10.6) Affinity Version 2.4.1 All (Designer | Photo | Publisher)   Beta; 2.4 2.2356
OS:Windows 10 Pro 22H2 OS Build 19045.4046+ Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.19053.1000.0
Rig:AMD FX 8350 and AMD Radeon (R9 380 Series) Settings Version 21.04.01 
Radeon Settings Version 2020
20.1.03) + Wacom Intuous 4M with driver 6.3.41-1

 

 

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5 minutes ago, Winsome said:

There are many roads to Rome, and you should probably google 'output sharpening' and 'enlarge for print' - especially output sharpening.

But I must mention Topaz Gigapixel, which is not the solution to everything that needs enlarging, but which has changed my relationship to size altogether in many contexts.

Gigapixel AI (topazlabs.com)

Sounds like a useful tool - I think for my purposes just now maybe the basic operations available within the software are enough - but I will look into that.

I ran a quick sample of the different upscaling operations through Document Setup for compare and there isn't much difference between them all really and think this should be enough for what I want to do here - it's a detailed design but in terms of colours it's quite minimal and most of the detail is greyscale really, in fact a lot of it is almost pure white.

Can see here samples of the four upscaled images compared to the original (first) - I did notice that I was resampling back to jpg in bilinear so not sure what different this makes - I really don't understand what these terms mean in the context of what I'm doing. But anyway - I think the results look fine and better than the original terrible effort I wasted money getting printed out because I was in a hurry (last image). 

AWAK_orig3000.JPG

AWAK_orig4500bicubic.JPG

AWAK_orig4500bilinear.JPG

AWAK_orig4500lanczos3nonsep.JPG

AWAK_orig4500lanczos3sep.JPG

AWAK_DSCLorder4-badupscale_.JPG

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9 minutes ago, StuartRc said:

and GIMP apparently (not tried!)

Thanks I'll make a note of all that. I used to use GIMP about ten years ago actually - it's not a bad piece of free software but I mostly used it for photoshop-esque stuff.

The design I'm talking about here is actually a rework of a something I did on GIMP around ten years ago.

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55 minutes ago, awakenedbyowls said:

I'm looking to upscale a design from 3000x2000px to 4500x3000px - basically a 50% increase so I'm figuring this should probably be suffice for my purposes and hopefully print out better than adding the 3000x2000px image to a 4500x3000px canvas and just enlarging it to fit using the Transform tool?

It doesn't really matter at what stage you upscale your finished layout. You can change your document size leaving DPI unchanged or increase DPI leaving dimensions unchanged – or leave the layout as it is and let the upscaling do during export by entering the desired DPI. So if you export as PDF you would use a DPI value 1.5 x higher than that which was used before – and then print the result in 1.5 x of its document size.

Means, if you scale the layout dimensions (3000 > 4500 px) you don't need to change the export DPI or print percentage size.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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Does it make much/any difference if I:

-drop a design jpg scaled to the size I need onto a larger canvas (print size) and then export it to jpg again, or

-go straight from the .sfdesign file to this?

I'm sort of exporting to jpg twice there really - is that bad? It doesn't seem to make much difference to the end result from what I can see..

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As far I understand upscaling a layer inside the app does not compress it. If you consider that not resampling but compressing respectively re-compressing causes JPG artefacts it would not make a difference whether you upscale inside the layout or during export only. Otherwise any scaling of a pixel layer inside the layout would cause a quality loss, same for saving an Affinity document.

But note: The "Rasterize" command resamples / reduces a pixel layer to the current document resolution, and turns an image layer accordingly to a pixel layer.

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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8 hours ago, thomaso said:

As far I understand upscaling a layer inside the app does not compress it. If you consider that not resampling but compressing respectively re-compressing causes JPG artefacts it would not make a difference whether you upscale inside the layout or during export only. Otherwise any scaling of a pixel layer inside the layout would cause a quality loss, same for saving an Affinity document.

But note: The "Rasterize" command resamples / reduces a pixel layer to the current document resolution, and turns an image layer accordingly to a pixel layer.

Layman's terms please!

I've got some gaps to fill..

For now though I'm happy with the result of basic operations on the software

I actually had the opportunity to study this stuff in detail and get really "under the hood" as they say once - as part of my Masters at UMIST in 95/96. I was good at Fourier Transforms and all that, but I decided to instead shaft my entire career by going into LASERs instead - which are far more difficult and boring. This course I didn't take was all about digital manipulation of images and stuff

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