Digital BW, The Print

Hello Sarah,

>I'm going to experiment a little, most definitely print some 
>cropped test images and go from there.

A couple of years ago I did some up-res experiments, trying several
techniques and using demos of several commercial products, and posted
the results in a discussion in this forum.  I saved it and have 
pasted it below.  I was able to up-res some 1.2 mg pocket digicam 
files about 8x to about 8mg and make very good 8x10-ish prints at 
around 300 dpi.  I hope this is helpful.

Regards,
Clayton


Info on black and white digital printing at    
http://www.cjcom.net/digiprnarts.htm
I-Trak 2.1   http://www.cjcom.net/itrak.htm


---------------------- From January, 2006 --------------------------
 >Peter said: You might find it worth downloading the trial version
  >of Photozoom Pro in that case as it seems almost as good. But if
  >you already have QImage its probably not worth bothering.
  
  I just downloaded and tried the Photozoom demo. Results are below in
  the list. Here's what I'm doing and what I've tried so far.
  
  The Challenge: upsize some 1.2 mp JPGs that were shot with a Casio
  Z-50, a pocket sized 5mp digicam. Upsize to 8mp.
  
  What I've tried:
  
  1) PS-CS/bicubic - surprisingly good results, way beyond my
  expectations. Everything else is compared to this.
  
  2) PS-CS/bicubic Smooth - not bad but compared to 1) is too soft to
  recover with more USM.
  
  3) PS-CS/bicubic Sharper - increased contrast too much & compressed
  shadows, plus halos.
  
  4) Qimage/Pyramid Print-To-file, at various sharpen settings - lots
  of patterned atrifacts and halos. Not even close to 1).
  
  5) Qimage/most other algorithms - various degrees of artifacts and
  halos. Nothing anywhere near 1) above.
  
  6) SizeFixer (someone did it for me) at normal setting (because it
  can't read the Casio exif for advanced mode)- very much like 1), but
  with worse jaggies on diagonals.
  
  7) Photozoom Pro - Ran demo with S-Spline (supposedly the best) at
  default settings. Result: Terrible. Looks horribly overprocessed and
  cartoonish. I didn't try any of the other algorithms.
  
  8) Jack Flesher's PS-CS/bicubic workflow, as described at this link
  (thanks to Carl Schofield for the tip):
  
  http://www.outbackphoto.com/workflow/wf_60/essay.html
  
  It goes like this:
  a) do all work to get the image ready to print, including 
     sharpening, at native resolution
  b) upsize with bicubic smoother to 20% past target resolution
  c) add more sharpening
  d) downsize with bicubic sharper to target resolution
  
  The result was much better than my straight bicubic workflow, in
  these ways:
  
  - sharper, with fewer sharpening artifacts
  - better shadow separation and low end contrast
  - over all look was sharper & contrastier with better shadow detail
  
  I could not match the results with my normal methods. My workflow
  has been this:
  - convert to grayscale
  - then upsize with bicubic
  - then do the work
  
  Then I did some experiments, and found that the real difference is 
  in doing the work, including sharpening, before upsizing. When I 
  changed my workflow to this:
  
  - convert to grayscale
  - do the work, including sharpening
  - then upsize with bicubic
  - add a bit more sharpening
  
  ...the result was nearly identical to the Flesher workflow. That
  print was still a tiny bit better. I did some tests with the 
  workflow and the crucial step seems to be in the sharpening added 
  between the two resizings. But it's real easy to add too much and 
  it starts looking overprocessed. Too little and it doesn't look 
  any better than the straight bicubic step. So it's playing right 
  on the edge, looking for the sweet spot.
  
  Seems like the really big difference comes from doing all the
  resizing after the work is done, rather than before it.
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