When I read this PetaPixel article I thought, well, maybe here's a justification for picking up a really cheap Sony A7S. The clickbait title had me at "Super Resolution Eliminates the Advantage of High-Megapixel Cameras".
If SuperResolution is a real "thing", then why spend money on more megapixels? Besides, I could use high ISO performance and an all electronic shutter for some of the things I do in museums. I don't want to disturb the fine citizens and visitors with a clacking shutter. And something that didn't get filled with noise would certainly make image processing easier. So I set off, AGAIN! to examine what's possible and to try and understand what's really going on.
The goal of all this thrashing was to see if there was a way of using Open Source software and match the perceived performance of something for pay, like Topaz's Gigapixel AI (or whatever they call it these days).
You see, I have more than a small beef with for-pay software, and particularly for-rent products like anything Adobe, or Capture One, or the other rentable image processing software that's out there (and there's a surprising amount of it).
I go back to a time when you could buy something, cash on the barrel head, and walk away with something that was durable and would last for decades. Mechanical cameras. Stereo systems. Music (vinyl or CD). You didn't rent anything if you could avoid it, other than an apartment.
Working with Capture One was frustrating. I had been using their image processing suite and left as soon as I realized they were transitioning to rent-ware. It drove me nuts.
I submitted bug reports and, while the bugs were quite valid, I was told to wait for a future update, or, as in one case, avoid using hardware acceleration. For that kind of aggravation I might as well go elsewhere. I have no tolerance for such things. I know how engineering can/should work, and they weren't even trying from what I could see. Jeter l’éponge, I voted with my money and my feet.
The timing worked out well, actually. One of the hard drives toasted itself and I had a new one installed. Being a several decades advocate for Linux I performed a clean Linux OS install, complete with all my favorite image processing software. I was thrilled. Everything ran visibly faster than it ever did on WinDoze. I knew all this from my work years, but someone had convinced me that the better stuff was on WinDoze and SnApple. I should never have listened to them.
OK. So that's a long way of saying I don't like rent-ware. Suffice it to say, I would be happy to find a workable Open Source image upsizing solution that performed anywhere near what the for pay packages do. At which point I entered a rather long series of examinations looking for a process/tool combination that gave acceptable results.
If you're interested in the twisted, rocky, strange road I took, here it is. I was convinced that image stacking would change the edges of contrast and color transition zones, and that this would be beneficial to upsizing/upscaling images in preparation for big, huge, enormous prints.
Maybe Full Frame would be better? Here's a Sony A7, Sony 35mm f/2.8 single Capture Sharpened and 5 image stack NoHalo upsize comparison all the way to 24,000 pixels on the long dimension.
Then I re-ran the Sony A7 single image comparison using a different image sharpener. And, again, this time using 5 image stacks. All looking for a way to smooth the edges of angular hard contrast transition edges.
I slipped to the side when, in the Dark of Night, I got to wondering how good/bad a 50+ year old Nikon Nikkor-S 50mm f/1.4 was, and, while I'm at it, why not add a little rigor by using lens test charts? Oh, and, gee, RawTherapee has a Lanczos upsize operator in it, too, doesn't it? So let me try that as well.
All this was driving me nuts! as I juggled the matrix of possibilities to find as direct a path to success as I could. Independent of my Dark of Night musings.
Remember what I wrote about the value of study and research? At this point, the skies parted, the light shown through, and... what's that? Argh. It's a Paris winter. But there's plenty of time to stumble around the "internets" when the light is low.
In my next post on Random Thoughts, I'll try to share what I found. And because I'm at this point 9 years late, most of you likely already know these things and many others, but if on the off-chance you're not already familiar, stay tuned.
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