Does Genuine fractals really works? (image resize)

[salf]

http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/genuine_fractals.php

 

It's aplugin, it says it allows you to resize you rimages without loss of quality.

 

Is that 100% true?

 

If so, it's great, I would buy it, if it would save me hours in rendering, since I could get away with smaller size, and then just resize it.

[Matt McDonald]

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

 

I've read that so called "stair interpolation" is just as effective as fractal based methods. To do stair interpolation increase your image size by 10% until you reach the desired size.

[Dave Buchhofer]

It all depends on what you're starting with.. if you have well defined edges and solid colors it'll work great, if its a mess of high frequency detail, it wont work magic..

 

Like matt says, you can do a decent job by resizing up in increments to say double your target size, doing a little bit of a smart blur (or surface blur), sharpening, and then resizing down to your 'final' size.

 

as a bonus this'll help to clear up jpg artifacts on really bad web images that you need to vastly enlarge.

 

Works for renderings too if you're really hurting for time. but not nearly as good as 'going big' to begin with

[salf]

Hey Dave, you still at Ewing Cole?, I interviewed with them about a year ago, glad I didn't accept it, I heard they layed off a lot of people because of the crisis.

 

Shoot me a PM.

 

On Topic: Yeah, I know it's better to start off with a big res. rendering, but sometimes you don't have the time, specially when the "higher ups" don't know how rendering works, and they can't really work with clay model renderings, they want the whole picture done to sketch over it.

 

I didn't know that 10% trick...gonna try it.

[schmoron13]

I've used it a ton and as far as v5, it's great. I heard v6 is buggy and takes tons of resources to run, but again, it depends on what you're going for. I had to render out and then print 6' x 3' images for thesis presentations (for myself and for classmates) done on a core2 duo so I couldn't render out at 11000 pixels (@150dpi) so we upped it to almost 600% if I remember correctly and for overall images, it worked great. For some of my renders that were heavy on lattices, it wasn't as sharp, but printing on mylar softened the overall images to where it wasn't noticable.

 

Overall, it works, if you can't/don't want to render out HUGE. But it depends what you want to do with the image. If it's for print, you have to take into account that seeing a detail on screen is misleading as you won't see huge images that close (billboards, etc).

 

hope this helps

[cjjat puresilica]

I can only tell you from my experience that yes it really works. I have taken quite small 72pixel renders and readily increased them to mega size files of 300 dpi and greater with absolutely no visible loss of quality. You can run a demo available from their website before you buy.

 

Christopher

[Peter M. Gruhn]

I tried a demo some years ago. It did some tasks nicely for certain not too ambitious scalings.

 

Pixel duplication will allow image upsizing without any _loss_ in quality. You are probably asking for is an increase in quality.

 

I'll have to try the 10% solution. Sounds dismal. ... Enh, a little softer than the single resample. Easy enough to make an action, so at least it isn't tedious.