Extreme enlargements

[bbd10]

What is extreme enlargement? You can think about this differently depending on final image purpose. Enlargement makes sense  if you want to print big. I have to clarify something here. You will never beat the guy with medium or large format camera but do not desperate. You have 16MP or 10MP camera with decent lens and want to print big? Simply print big.

 

What I consider as large format here? I very often have to print 10MP image with dimensions of 80x54 cm (31.5x21.3 inches). This means, that I have to enlarge image 6.5 times. This is what I consider as extreme enlargement. This is a little different meaning that extreme enlargement has for somebody who wants to print image for a billboard.

 

Do you want to discuss huge enlargement with Affinity Photo? Attachments are in JPG format, but this should be an illustration of my idea: high contrast, saturation, and preservation of details. (Idea only, JPG is worst option here)

 

Attachments:

(...)_Source: Original take,

(...)_W-Mextreme_vlv-2-reduced: On screen result (converted to 8bits for channel and sRGB)

 

 

[bbd10]

Enlargement can be also used for sharpening the final image.

 

Procedure:

Enlarge image with Lanczos 3 separable (four times or more). You can use non-separable version, but then you have to deal with increased halos. Now you can add some local contrast with clarity and sharpness with unsharp mask. The local contrast will be increased during next step, halos from sharpening reduced.

 

With all adjustments applied export image using bilinear resampling and original dimensions.

 

Attachments:

MAH_7894_2_FV50s: source

MAH_7894_2_FV50-OSs: result