Winter is a good time for sunsets on the Pacific Northwest coast—you just have to ignore the wind and the cold. A small digital camera is ideal in that situation but would the resulting file make a high-quality big print?
Taken with a 12MP camera, this image seemed to be a good candidate for our tests. Photo: © Donald J. Rommes
Given the trend towards larger prints in the healthcare and hospitality environments, we at Iris Arts have made sure our files are easily large enough to make very big prints. That means we use higher resolution cameras and/or stitch images from such cameras to make a very big file to star with.
Of course, as digital technology has evolved, so has camera resolution. Ten years ago, a 40 MP camera was very expensive and not really suitable for most landscape photography. Today, 40-50 MP cameras are more common (if still expensive) and even 100 MP weather-sealed cameras are now available.
Anyone photographing for more than a decade has many images that were created with digital cameras that — although high resolution at the time — are lower resolution cameras by today's standards. Or they worked with film cameras because that was all that was available.
We also have a number of lower resolution images from small, lightweight digital cameras we took on spur-of-the-moment outings or on long backpacking trips where weight was a major consideration. There are some great scenes from some of those outings, but how would those files compare to files from higher resolution cameras? Could we make usable big prints from those smaller files that would meet our standards for quality?
Recent (a bit more than year ago) improvements in software to enlarge files piqued our curiosity. In particular, Adobe Super-Resolution was of interest to us because it is easy and quick and works on RAW images. Machine learning was used to make the software "smarter." When used on RAW files, the "enhanced" file is still in the RAW space, but is four times larger and is said to have improved apparent resolution. When it works well, it's as if we used a 48MP camera to take a photo that was, in fact, taken with a 12MP camera.
We reviewed our archives to determine if some of our smaller-resolution original files would be candidates for super-resolution. There is a bit of a learning curve, but with careful processing, our results are often very good. The key is careful processing — to avoid artifacts that get magnified in the process and become visible in the print.
The photo above shows an Oregon beach at low tide in February. It was taken with a 12MP camera carried because of its low weight and because we really didn't expect great light. However, as luck would have it, the rain stopped, the clouds cleared slightly, and this scene developed. Until a year ago, although we really like the image, we didn't put it up on our website due to its smallish native file size. However, after using super-resolution for the enlargement, we have a 48MP image that looks great and is suitable for big prints.
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