On a rainy Sunday in Texas...
It seems that at any given moment you can find a discussion about pixels someplace on the forum. "I want more pixels." "you really don't need more." "How am I going to print large?" "Large prints? Stand farther from them." Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Very recently Adobe introduced
Enhancement for Camera Raw which will use "machine learning" to quadruple the number of pixels of an image (doubling each side). Thus a 6000 x 4000 pixel image becomes a 12000 x 8000 pixel image. In 2020, Pixelmator (Mac only) introduced Pixelmator Pro with its own machine learning up-sampling that would go so far as to triple the pixels on each side for an image as much as nine times as large.
For someone with little to do on a rainy Sunday, it only made sense to me to compare Adobe and Pixelmator and also to just "go for the gold" by first enlarging with Adobe Camera Raw and then enlarging the enlargement with Pixelmator Pro.
Here's the results.
The original photo was taken with a K-3II and the plastic 35mm lens. Settings were 35mm, f/11, 1/160 sec, and ISO 250. The only processing done to the photo was to click the Auto Adjust Button and the Lens Profile corrections in Camera Raw.
The final images are as follows:
- Original Image 6000 x 4000 pixels
- Adobe Image 12000 x 8000 pixels
- Pixelmator Image 18000 x 12000 pixels
- Adobe/Pixelmator Combo 32000 x 21277 (Pixelmator maxes its up-sampling at 32,000 so it is not 36000 x 24000)
I have included 2 sets of crops: The first set of crops are a 5 x 7 crop of the exact same area. The size of the crop of the original image is 872 x 1221 px. The other crops have been reduced to 1429 x 2000 px for this post. Their original dimensions are noted. It's worth noting that the original 5 x 7 crop of the huge combo enlargement is actually larger than the original image.
The second set consists of 1000 x 1000 px crops from each of the enlargements. For comparative fairness I have also included a 2000x2000 pixel crop of the very largest image.
Here is the original photo with a red rectangle around the area that was used for the crops.
5 x 7 CROPS Original Image 872 x 1221 px Adobe Camera Raw (2x) 1756 x 2458 px Pixelmator (3x) 2651 x 3711 px Camera Raw/Pixelmator Combo (5.3x) 4640 x 6496 px 1000 x 1000 PIXEL CROPS Original Image Adobe Camera Raw Pixelmator Camera Raw/Pixelmator 1000 x 1000 Camera Raw/Pixelmator 2000 x 2000