Applelust.com: A Look at... High Dynamic Range Photography and Photomatix Pro Software

A Look at... Genuine Fractals 4.1

In a world in which bigger is somehow always considered better, the digital photographer has been involved in a megapixel race with what seems to be almost daily increases in the megapixels available from digital cameras. Almost every photography magazine fills the cover with the newest and greatest (which is usually meant to be the BIGGER megapixel count) digital cameras. Only when times are slow do the magazines get back around to comparing and presenting cameras in the less than six to eight megapixel range.

When I first began to make the switch to using digital cameras I believe my first digital camera was a one or two megapixel camera, which produced a reasonable picture at about 2 x 3 inches if "reasonable" was used charitably...and of course I wanted a bigger image. Everyone wanted a bigger image. At the time I was regularly printing 16" x 20" crisp images from two and a quarter roll film from the roll back on my Horseman VHR; and even bigger images from 4" x 5" film; and even 11" x 14" images from 35mm film seemed razor sharp by comparison with my digital images. But the digital images were immediate; not only could I take a quick look at the miniature LCD screen on the back of the camera, I could download to my Mac Wallstreet and look at them more or less at leisure within minutes.

I tried shooting scenes in parts and carefully fitted together dozens of overlapping images to make 8" x 10" prints and daringly some 11" x 14"s that I was proud of, and today wouldn't show to anyone. But I had gotten more megapixels per picture by adding picture to picture—more detail and sharper images resulted from this labor-intensive task. Photoshop was replacing my darkroom. My enlarger bulb burned out and I kept meaning to replace it and kept forgetting. The darkroom stagnated and grew dusty.

Every six to nine months after 1998 I had to have a new digital camera. One and two megapixels jumped to something larger. I went from Nikon Coolpix 900 to 950; then 990 and finally 995; then daringly to the Coolpix 5000, then the 5700. Next came the 7500, the 8700, and finally the 8800. Eight, count ‘em, eight—megapixels had arrived along with a 10x zoom lens. I was ecstatic. Then came the Nikon D2x—12.2 effective megapixels—not only was I ecstatic; I was broke; or it seemed that way until...

In the meantime my laptop computers had transitioned from Wallstreet to Pismo to Titanium and finally to the 17" Aluminum. Photoshop had gone from 6 to 6.5 to 7 to CS to CS2 and I had made all these transitions right along with the cameras. The cash drain continued! Somewhere around 2004 I sold the darkroom equipment and the Horseman, but kept the Nikon 35mm gear...but only for a while.

Printers went through these same transitions. The Epson 2000 was my workhorse for a time, producing 10.5" x 14" inch images almost daily. Then came the moment when I bought the Epson 7600 to handle 24" wide paper by what seemed to me to be infinite lengths for panoramas.

This tale of growth is the metaphor I'd like to use to describe human character. We always want something bigger, grander, faster, more...and in the case of the photographer we are back to paragraph one. WE WANT TO MAKE BIG ONES OUT OF LITTLE ONES and our quest is seemingly unending. We may not actually need big ones, but we want the possibility to produce them if the desire occurs.

Enter GENUINE FRACTALS 4.1. This software is essentially a one trick pony; that's what it does. It makes big ones out of little ones...up to a point. But that point is pretty high. To get a bigger image at the same printer output, the computer has to add pixels. Where and how it adds them is the trick. OnOne thinks it has figured out a method that works, and after producing prints with the new Genuine Fractals 4.1 version, I have to pretty much agree with them. It does work.

The first iterations of Genuine Fractals appeared before 2000. One Genuine Fractals disk, labeled version 2.0 that is in my CD/DVD storage binders, is dated 1998. Genuine Fractals was owned by the Altamira Group at that time. I had previously tried it and not cared particularly for it, and let it fall by the wayside in my search for the ultimate solution for making images bigger. At that point all I knew how to do that worked for me was to use Photoshop in bicubic mode and to enlarge the image ten percent at a time until it had reached the size I wanted. I did this for years. Saving the image file to a proprietary one as Genuine Fractals then required and then resizing from there had seemed awkward and non-intuitive.

Now Genuine Fractals is owned by onOne Software and has been updated heavily with a revamped and much more intuitive interface which functions as a plug-in within Photoshop. It is available either individually ($159.95 or as an upgrade from previous versions for $69.95) or as part of the onOne Photoshop plug-in Suite containing Genuine Fractals 4.1, Mask Pro, PhotoFrame Pro, and Intellihance Pro for $399.95 and an upgrade for $299.95, Genuine Fractals has evolved into a very workable solution to "make big ones out of little ones". To survive, all things must grow and develop, and Genuine Fractals 4.1 has done just that.

Some restrictions apply (don't they always?). There is no magic button to take a weak and out of focus image and make a mural sized work of art out of it. If you start with junk, it will just be bigger junk by the time you have finished. It won't work with layers in an image, so you will have to flatten the image first if any correction layers exist.

If you start with a sharp(ened) image, already processed to remove noise, and you have fixed the contrast and tonality, then you can expect to make an enlargement up to a maximum 800% increase with an often acceptable loss of detail in part because of the viewing distance based on the larger size of the print.

In practical terms with a somewhat less than quality image it means that a tiff image of 4" x 5" @ 300 pixels (about 5 megabytes) can make a good image up to 12" x 15". Here in this example from an original 4" x 5" image from a back street in Morocco in 2000 done with a 1200 x 1600 pixel (2 megapixel) camera, probably a Nikon Coolpix 950.

A Moroccan backstreet

To reprint this image using Photoshop CS2 with Genuine Fractals 4.1, I applied Photoshop's unsharp mask first at a radius of 1.0 at an amount of 100. Since this was a reprint and I had Noise Ninja already in my computer it was applied based on auto-profiling of the original image.

The resulting image at 3x, even though starting from a minimal file of approximately five megabytes, did enlarge to a 12" x 15" image that was quite acceptable and much better than the 10% increment bicubic method I had used before. (On a personal note, I'm glad version 4.1 didn't exist between 2000 and 2005; if it had my wife would have never have gone along with the upgrades of camera equipment, software, computer gear, and printers at the frequency we did. It would have been unnecessary because Genuine Fractals 4.1 would have made the big ones out of little ones possible from five to eight megapixel images and I would never have laid hands on a D2x camera. Don't tell her!).

Begin with a quality image and the enlargement possibilities present startlingly pleasing results. The following image shows the results of using an image from a 12.2 megapixel Nikon D2x. The original image was slightly cropped, but resulted in an image of 9.8 inches high by 7.557 wide at 300 pixels/inch. This resulted in a total image size of almost 32 megabytes. Obviously, a 2x enlargement would produce a 19.6" h x 15" w, a 4x enlargement would be a 39" h x 30.4" w, and a 6x would be a 58.8" h x 45.6" w. Since I don't have a printer that will print beyond 24" in width, I had to do it in sections to see the results. It does work; it actually does work.

The Fiddler

Here's how it works. Once Genuine Fractals 4.1 is loaded into Photoshop it takes its place in the Automate menu under File.

Photoshop Automate Menu

The appearing window shows a view of the image to be enlarged and allows the selection of the method of enlargement. Enlargement methods can be by the use of pixels, %, millimeters, centimeters, and inches.

Genuine Fractals Window

This allows the choice of the most appropriate method of enlarging the image to a specific size. Tools allow zooming in, movement within the image when zoomed, cropping, and there is a navigator window to determine the position of the viewing window.

In my experiments I did find that some small amount of additional sharpening was necessary when in the 6 to 8 x range of enlargement. The simple rule of the game for 2x to 4x enlargement is to do all image corrections before any attempt at magnification is begun. Sharpening and noise removal at the original image size are the most critical. Small adjustments in tone, contrast, or color may be done on the larger images, but simply put, it is much easier and better to do it all before enlargement.

Genuine Fractals 4.1 is not a solution for dealing with poor images, and it isn't going to make wall-filling images from a 4 or 5 megapixel original file, but it certainly will make decent 11" x 14", 13" x 19", and even possibly a 16" x 20". OnOne has a winner in this 4.1 version of Genuine Fractals.

It means that photographers can produce reasonable images from existing four to eight megapixel cameras. Rather than an upgrade to the next camera to come along, upgrade money might be better spent in adding onOne's Genuine Fractals 4.1 to the photographers' digital darkroom's tools.

Contact onOne software, 153 SW Sequoia Pkwy, Ste. 190, Portland, OR 97224; (503) 968-1468; OnOnesoftware.com.

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