Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Tyler Boley" 
<tyler@...> wrote:
>
> I believe it's been mentioned, but the following upsize method has
> been working extremely well here. This assumes you need to get UP to
> 360dpi at print size.
> Res up to 720dpi at final print size using bicubic smoother.
> Very carefully apply some USM, for example 1 at 100 or so, barely
> visible on display.
> Res down to print size at 360dpi using bicubic sharper.
> 

That's interesting. I usually sharpen a bit and then upsize 110% 
bicubic smoother and re-downsize for 100% bicubic sharper for a final 
360 res. I've never try a full res upsize and your method (lack of 
proper thinking about it I guess). Now for large files, if one wants 
to check every part of the image for the sharpening you then have to 
go thru the whole image piece by piece which is a bit of a hassle at 
720 dpi even for a 12x16" (equivalent 30x40cm metric system).

The question is : when you downsize back at 360, the driver will then 
do its own upsize at 720 (I'm talking of 4xxx printers). It's my 
understanding the method implemented is bilinear (though I'm not 
sure), so don't you loose the initial benefit of a controlled 
resizing and sharpening, and just add an extra (time consuming) step 
to the worklow. In short, is it worth it ?

Last, I don't feel that the Gimp engine embedded in QTR is capable of 
showing a great difference between various upsizing methods, 
specially on matte media, but here it's down to everyone's eyes and 
much open to discussion.

But I have to say : I like the idea and will be putting it on 
my "must try" list (which is aldready quite long). Thanks for 
indicating it.

Olivier