Digital BW, The Print

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.

With large 16 bit scans you'll have big intermediate file sizes, but
it'll pass...
Obvioulsy the concept can be applied to other sizes and dpi's as well.
Just OVER upsize with smoother, then downsize to desired with sharper.
The USM is subjective, I don't like much if any.

Another extremely useful task made possible by Roy's single channel
profiler-
I have years of files that were optimized for a now antiquated system
of creating quads that was not as device linearizable as today's options.
At some point before bagging that system I had printed and measured a
step wedge from it.
I was able to make an icc profile with Roy's app using those
measurements. Now, I can open those old files, assign that profile,
and convert to whatever may be necessary to print on a comteporary system.
I've successfully matched new PiezoTone prints made with StudioPrint
and a 9600 with old 3000 manually separated quads printed with the old
PressReady RIP.
Color management and Roy come though again.
Here's a lesson, perhaps a text file of your current output system,
and/or it's profile, should be made and saved indefinitely.
Tyler

--- 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