SmillaEnlarger

I was reading up on scaling algorithms today and while doing, stumbled upon a small free program which, after testing, does a reasonable good job at scaling. It has some settings you can adjust to your liking and can handle more than one format.

Here's some scaling I did of the first shot I encountered in my folder. They go from 100% to 400%. I used a processed shot which isn't the right approach since sharpening has to be done in the to be used size but even so, this is what they look like. Noise evidently becomes more obvious too.









The shots scale to a similar size in this post but upon clicking should show their normal size. I hope.

I won't link since it leads to download sites but if you google SmillaEnlarger, it'll be on the page.

Already playing with it, thanks.

I'm playing with it too. It does a decent job but of course no miracles. I still checked what extreme cases look like.

Here's a full shot:



Cropped detail at 100%:



Now that detail resized to 500% and saved in the same format/scale as the rest. It's now about the same size as my original shot. Sharpened at this scale and denoised.



100% crop of this 500% version. This is the equivalent of a 30k*20k shot. You need one hell of a sensor for that.



Like I said; no miracles but still a decent job. For normal scaling this one will do fine.
I scaled everything in their TiFF version.

I'm testing another program which uses fractal interpolation to scale.

Here's a 100% crop of one of my shots. I doubled that up to 200% and then cropped a 100% out of that.





I still need to figure out all the settings of this algorithm and try to get the windows only version working on the Mac.

Another algorithm.

The program is Image analyzer, free to download and you have to google "fractal interpolation" + the prog name to find plugins.

200%



400% which turned out to be a bit too much and I scaled that down by 1/3th.


300%

Here's an example should anyone not realize the advantage of these scalers.

This is a shot that has been cropped to its max. I could not get closer so it's too small to do anything besides posting online:



After scaling with these algorithms I again have a higher Mpix shot, that allows me to crop, or even print larger.



I used the JPG to scale so it's not as perfect as a TiFF would be.