ultra high res rendering

[STRAT]

Hi guys

 

I'm making a couple of images for bill-board advertising. as an example of one i'm doing right now -

 

the client wants one of my photomontages on an advertising board of 6.5 meters wide.

 

no probs. i re-render my model at 15000 pixels wide @ 72 dpi standard. this equates to about 6.5 meters long @ 60 dpi. but the problem is the backround image i'm photomontaging into.

 

the backround was a photo i took at 5 megapixels. no way on earth this can be digitally blown up. even if i print the photo out nicely and re-scan it into the computer at a high res i still have to re-size the thing and the whole process still looses so much quality.

 

any suggestions for this problem? considering i dont really want to lower my render image quality too much down to match the photos. else it'd be pointless rendering at high res in the first place.

[STRAT]

looks interesting. D/Ling now

[dbarc]

Strat - Isn't your viewing distance going to be roughly proportional to the image size - ie if it were an A4, you view it a foot away from you and if it's 6.5 metres you're likely to be alot further back? I'm just wondering whether you need to go that big. Our images are regulary added to boards 20 feet wide and over and we only render 4000 across which works fine because of the distance they're viewed from.

 

Anway, I did look into increasing the res of an existing image a while back trying various PS plugins and the best method I came up with is to simply increase the image size in PS in small incremental steps (say 10% each time) until you reach your target res.

[STRAT]

TDD - nice plug that, but pretty limited.

 

DB - yeah, i agree. i'd normally send large res prints like this out at 20 or 30 dpi, but the client and printers insisted on it being at least 60 dpi. the trouble is that the bill board will be in a highly public area at ground level, so peeps will be wondering right up to it.

 

about scaling up the image in small increments? say, thats a good i dea. didnt think if that. i'll give it a try right now

[STRAT]

hmmm, incremental sizing doesnt do much really. a half decent method i just tried was to size up the photo to like 25000 pixels wide, then down size it to 15000. but still not really acceptable.

[chutti]

Hi..

 

you can go to a photo lab and printout your back ground photo at 20 inch x 30 inch

then you can drumscan this photo to 900 resolution or higher to your needs

that may help.

[JamesTaylor]

how about, uping the resolution of your original image to an approdiate DPI say 1000dpi but without altering its size, afterwards you then resize the image to 6.5m creating an end result that is at 60dpi.

 

i don't know if this will make any difference but i guess that since you are creating a highly detailed of the original by uping its dpi the resize should have better information to reinterpolate the pixals when enlarging?

 

just a thought,

 

James

[Simon Moir]

http://www.imaging-resource.com/SOFT/GF/GF.HTM

[IC]

I'd just accept the inevitable and reduce the size of your render. No matter what you do to the bg photo, it's going to look wrong behind a 15,000 pixel render (imho).

[DennisHolland]

Here comes the limitation of digital photography....

 

It would be no prob at all using anologue but that is not really relevant here. If your boardproducer is a prof. he should have 'rip-sofware' in his big printer, like Matan Termal Transfer System (MTTS) to deal with this issue in large scaling renders. Deliver your renders in layers, let him rip the background and have it pasted in ps at the correct coordinates, bring along a lower res result as a guide...done.

 

I do it and it looks great. Even when his billboardprinter is set on 50 DPI you're looking at a fairly sharp printed billboard...

 

Dennis

[dbarc]

I'd just accept the inevitable and reduce the size of your render. No matter what you do to the bg photo, it's going to look wrong behind a 15,000 pixel render (imho).

 

From experience I tend to agree - We recently produced a very hi res aerial image of a business park montaged into an aerial photo. We did render at 16000 across ..but then ended up adding noise and blur to the CG stuff in order to match visually with the photograph. It still looked great because people expect photos to be slightly blurry blown up - but it did call into question whether we needed to go that high res in the first place.

 

Just bought some of your trees off Turbosquid by the way Strat..

[STRAT]

 

Just bought some of your trees off Turbosquid by the way Strat..

 

 

weeeeeeeeeeeee! cool, thank you

[bjornkn]

You should check out Genuine Fractals. It's absolutely amazing how good the quality is when blowing up digital images. I often render at half size and then use it to enlarge it, which often makes it look better than if I render at full size, and it blends better with back/fore-ground.

[CHE]

Hi Strat,

 

Photo Zoom might be what you are looking for. Check it out.

http://www.benvista.com/main/content/content.php

[the.3dsmax.blogger]

... the best method I came up with is to simply increase the image size in PS in small incremental steps (say 10% each time) until you reach your target res.

Best ? I dont think so.. With each small resize you would be adding generation loss. the kind of blurring that happens when PS interpolates pixels upwards. One single resize is best compared to multiple small resizes. IMHO

[Jeff Mottle]

Here's another one for the mix http://www.fredmiranda.com/shopping/SIpro

[STRAT]

cheers fellers. great response. the one CHE mentioned is fantastic. a m8 suggested it to me too.

[mtutaj]

take a look at gf printpro.. I have used it in the past and does a pretty good job..

 

I'm looking for the link

 

hope this works, can't seem to find the product page anymore

 

http://www.digitalriver.com/dr/v2/ec_MAIN.Entry10?xid=15628&PN=1&SP=10023&V1=641634&CID=132656&CUR=840&DSP=&PGRP=0&CACHE_ID=132656

 

Mike

[mtb0506]

What would happen if you were to render just the background image at the desired resolution? would there be a loss in quality?

[STRAT]

What would happen if you were to render just the background image at the desired resolution? would there be a loss in quality?

 

yeah, of course there would, hence the post

 

rendering out the backround image at the desirered res is exactly the same as blowing it up in photoshop - if the photoinfor aint there in the first place you can't just have the computer 'invent' it by rendering or sizing it bigger.

[VCRUPI]

I'd have to agree with using Photozoom.

It has done wonders for me in the past with billboard size renderings.

Good luck!

[4DM]

I don't see the problem - you're going to be looking at a billboard from 15 yards (metres) across the street. Walk right up to it and you'll probably see the individual dots. Large scale printers have RIP software to interpolate the image anyway.

 

If you're really concerned, get some 5"x4", or larger, analogue photos done and scan them at really high res.

 

But the advice about resizing in Photoshop in one step is good. Not small increments.

 

In the end the only person who would notice anything amiss with the image is you.

The public are still going to buy the overpriced apartments anyway.

Or not.

But the photo quality of the background won't make a blind bit of difference either way!

 

Cheers,

 

D.

[jcorpe]

Something else to consider would be using an LVT film recorder and then drum scanning the image. Might be worth looking into. I haven't had any real experience with it but the last time I was at IVEY, the guys there told me Starbucks brought in a small digital image and they blew it up for a large sign quite effectively with the above process. http://www.ivey.com/ivey/pdf/lvt.pdf

[Ernest Burden III]

I think the suggestions of printing and scanning the image are flawed because they create a third-generation result. Your image is already digital--going analog theb cack to digital does not make sense to me.

 

This billboard thing has come up with my work recently, too. I looked into the base position--a photo negative as an image source. The most common format is 35mm film, though many pros use 2 1/4". But we are low-rent types, by nature, so let's stick with the trusty 35mm. What exactly is the effective 'dpi' of film? Remember, it has grains of chemicals to capture light--it is not capable of infinite detail. What is the corelation to pixels? What I found is that a 35mm negative is capable of a resolution at best of about 6000 x 4000. Now that is analog color, which a CCD isn't.

 

So you cannot get resolution better than that no matter what you do. That makes the negative about 20 - 24MP, while your digital photo is 5MP. So you still have a ways to go, but you simply cannot create data that isn't there. The fractal enlarger does a good job, I have heard, at enlarging in a visually pleasing way--but it cannot create what wasn't there before. You are best simply working with the digital file directly.

 

Start by bumping it up to 16 bit before the enlarge, if memory allows. You can go back to 8 bit afterwards, but it will allow for better transitions in the enlarging. It may not work, though. One way to make the best of an enlarged digital is to use unsharp mask to clean up edges. The trick is to not apply it over the whole image. There is a technique where you make a mask by 'find edges' the blur that and force black/white to result in a mask that focuses on mostly the edges. Otherwise you will sharpen all the noise in the image which will defeat the purpose.

[DennisHolland]

While we are dealing with the issues of sharpest quality on a very large scale, the following...

 

I had a job to do (modelling and rendering, 2 weeks ago) of a free-style greenhouse, needed to make a kingsize sticker at width 1.20 mtr x 3.30 mtr. The client wanted me to slice it up and paste the slices on the front steps of a stairway so it looked like there were no stairs at all until you walked upon it. The final result will be very cool, i'll post a digi-shot of it later since the exhibition opening is next week (nov. 09)

 

This has almost nothing to do with this thread but i had to deal with high-res AND great quality preserved as well...

 

The printer wanted it at 65/72 DPI minimum so in pixels I had to render it at appr. 8500 px height, actual render was done at 8995 maximum resolution in Vray. Printer used the Matan Termal Transfer System to print the large sticker and the quality was very nice, exept for the sky which was a 3500 pixels width jpg, uncompressed. I decided to grab the PDF (230 Mb, CMYK high quality print, converted by printer) and deleted the sky in Photoshop.

 

I used the method, posted by me in the first page of this thread, and the result was quite high-end...yet complicated. I like to know a more simple way but it seems that there is no real option for these productions then all of the mentioned above as a middle of the road option. There should be a better way, or more professional...

 

Dennis