Hi, I was wondering what a good workflow for uprezzing of photos should be, in terms of the overall image processing steps.
My general workflow is as follows:
ACR, just the usual exposure, WB etc and then brought into photoshop.
At this point I usually examine the image and see if there is any cloning or dust removal necessary and it is then done on a seperate layer.
Next, I will determine if there is any noise reduction to be done and this could be done in a variety of ways including using edge masks etc.
Finally, I use photokit sharpener and do an input sharpen as necessary, again with masks etc if necessary.
After this point, I will do the usual adjustment layers, local contrast enhancement, saturation etc, until I am happy with the overall image.
At this point I will do creative sharpening again with a variety of possible tools until I am happy.
So, I now have a number of layers and am ready for the final crop and uprezzing to my final print size. I usally do this at the last stage so that I can always change this if necessary. Of course, all of the adjustments are still available since I am using layers as much as possible.
However, I have pretty well determined that the quality of uprezzed images are much better if you uprez before you do anything else (except maybe noise reduction). I found this from comparing images with and without processing on a 4 times enlargement.
So here lies the question: If you crop and uprez before any processing, you are then stuck with having to do all of the whole procedure over if you wish to change crop or output.
I print 60" prints on a daily basis and it takes maybe 1 to 1.5 minutes to run the PK Sharpener (smart sharpen) at 240ppi on a 1.4GB file. 2.66Ghz MacPro with 8GB RAM - SATA RAID 0.
You have to run sharpening after Interpolation to avoid a ton of problems.
tomb18 wrote:
However, I have pretty well determined that the quality of uprezzed images are much better if you uprez before you do anything else (except maybe noise reduction). I found this from comparing images with and without processing on a 4 times enlargement.
Surely something one does will suffer if they are up sized latter however I find your statement to general and a bit hard to believe.
Qimage is probably the best program for upscaling before printing. I've done comparisons with Photoshop CS3/Bicubic and Qimage's Pyramid scaling and Qimage wins hands down. The latest versions use even more advanced algorithms. Qimage also does the final sharpening before printing.
Have a look on the luminous landscape printing forums, where half the people there are using 24-44" printers and most of them seem to use Qimage (even though they own CS3, Lightroom etc.). That should telly you something.
Another vote for Qimage. I rarely do anything other than let Qimage use its "smart sharpening" and the interpolations within Qimage for 16x20 prints that look great.
