Resizing original photo

[shaza]

Hello all I have designer 2 but looking at affinity photo my question is does this program allow you to enlarge a  photo up to A3 without loosing quality please

[Komatös]

45 minutes ago, shaza said:

Hello all I have designer 2 but looking at affinity photo my question is does this program allow you to enlarge a  photo up to A3 without loosing quality please

There is no general answer to this question. It depends on the size of the source image.

The smaller the source image is, the less detail will be contained in the enlarged image.

You don't necessarily need Affinity Photo to enlarge the image, you can also use Affinity Designer/Affinity Publisher. However, their algorithms are limited.

If you often have small images that you need/want to enlarge, then take a look at Topaz GigaPixel AI!
 

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, Komatös said:

you can also use Affinity Designer/Affinity Publisher. However, their algorithms are limited.

More limited than Photo?

[Komatös]

@walt.farrell

In German, it would be clear that this also means Affity Photo. But yes, in terms of post-processing options, Affinity Photo is preferable to the other two programs in the suite.

[thomaso]

7 hours ago, Komatös said:

In German, it would be clear that this also means Affity Photo. But yes, in terms of post-processing options, Affinity Photo is preferable to the other two programs in the suite.

I'd like to disagree and I was irritated like @walt.farrell when reading that sentence. Now, with your addition "Affinity Photo is preferable" it sounds still (up to more) ambiguous since the initial sentence started rather in the opposite way: "You don't necessarily need Affinity Photo". – Also the part "in terms of post-processing options" confuses me since post-processing options aren't a question here, right?

I'd try it this way, to answer @shaza's question: Upscaling in Affinity is never "without loosing quality", especially if your idea of quality includes sharpness. Upscaling needs to add pixels, e.g. one new between two existing, and thus the colour values of the additional pixels matters and defines the impression of quality. To judge your possible result it needs to know your initial image size before upscaling, – just knowing the wanted final size "A3" is not really meaningful since cameras can take pictures for that size meanwhile.

For upscaling images there exist special apps, they analyse the image content (via artificial intelligence) and are able to sharpen certain areas and avoid sharpening in others. Their resulting quality depends a lot on the image content, some seem to be specialised for face improvement (hair, eyes, skin), others offer options like 'architecture' or 'art'.

Affinity apps don't offer this upscaling technology yet, nevertheless APhoto offers – additionally to the 'standard' upscaling & resampling skills like AD and APub – a separate feature called "Resize Pixel Art Document…"  with the two options "HQX" and "XBR". The resulting quality of this feature may depend on the image content, especially compared to the standard upscaling & resampling options. Comparing "HQX" with "XBR" the difference appears to be rather subtle than obvious, in its intensity similar to the difference between the available resampling methods "Bicubic" and "Lanczos 3" for standard upscaling in APh, AD or APub.

[NotMyFault]

10 hours ago, thomaso said:

Affinity apps don't offer this upscaling technology yet, nevertheless APhoto offers – additionally to the 'standard' upscaling & resampling skills like AD and APub

Designer offers the same upscale methods like Photo, including HQX and XBR. (In V1 and v2).

So to answer the original question:

19 hours ago, shaza said:

Hello all I have designer 2 but looking at affinity photo my question is does this program allow you to enlarge a  photo up to A3 without loosing quality please

Designer and Photo offer the identical set of resize methods, so this function alone is no reason to switch to Photo.

Photo in general is far more capable to edit pixel/bitmap documents. It offers a plugin interface, and some plugins like gmic may help to improve perceived sharpness of images after rescaling. You will definitely benefit from some of Photos filters in the sharpen category to reduce the side effects of resizing.

Neither in Photo or in Designer is a single-click „upscale“ function which combines resizing and successive steps like sharpening.

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, NotMyFault said:

Designer offers the same upscale methods like Photo, including HQX and XBR. (In V1 and v2).

Are you sure about that? I cannot find a "Resize Pixel Art Document" menu item in any of AD's personas or any mention of HQX or XBR anywhere in its UI.