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Hi, I have a 3.2 megapixel camera and like to crop certain parts of my highest resolution pictures. However, I obviously lose quality the smaller down I go. Is there a plugin that can help me with this problem, or do I just need a higher resolution camera? Thanks.

Here are some possibilities:

1. Only crop the image down to a size of 1600x1200 pixel. That corresponds to a 2 Megapixel image which can still nicely be printed at the standard size.

2. If you need to crop a smaller area, you can still try to resize your photo in your graphics application. However, use a bicubic or better method for that and only resize by max. 200%. Afterwards sharpen the photo sufficiently. Of course this is the worst choice.

3. Use your camera's zoom or simply move closer to your photographic subject and choose the best section of the scene before taking a photo. That way you don't need to crop your photos later.

4. As you said, you can also purchase a 4, 5 or 6 Megapixel camera. That gives you much more room for cropping.

I have a 4 megapixel camera and I worry about this too. So I save post edits in PNG format. no further loss.

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once browsers natively support it JPeG200 will be a better option -- when you use the LOSSLESS encoding method.

This plug in isn't cheap but it will let you do a good job of scaling raster images up to 1600%. It's used for blowing photos up to posters, etc.

Just in case you didn't see it, the plug in is LizardTech's Fractal Print Pro:

http://www.lizardtech.com/solutions/photo/

There are several tools that let you enlarge images with the help of special algorithms. However, I wouldn't recommend you to enlarge images by more than 400%, otherwise the quality loss will be very visible.

Irfan is a freeware and it does a good job enlarging your images by a fractal algoritm. The result craves a bit sharpening, that can be done in Irfan too.

Actually, this is a problem I have at several photo labs I support; and I've found that the RGB version of Genuine Fractals works just fine, all the way up to 600% (depending on the original). The CMYK version is almost double the price, but if you have a photo printer you don't need to spend the extra money.

I've used this plug-in to expand a particularly good photo of Jon Wood & Brendan Gaughan crunching fenders at Martinsville I shot this spring with a 6 megapixel Fuji FinePix S1 Pro all the way up to an uncropped size of 42" x 63" (uncropped) for output on a Durst Epsilon 30" RGB printer at 254 pixels per inch.

JimK wrote:Just in case you didn't see it, the plug in is LizardTech's Fractal Print Pro:

http://www.lizardtech.com/solutions/photo/

I have had excellent success with IRFANVIEW to (1) enlarge the picture, then (2) to crop and sharpen. For my purposes, a 1600x1200 pixel is best enlarged by 3X (4800x3600). The crop is nominal, however, I do the crop and subsequent sharpening using PSP-7 or PSP-8, as these are my favorite digital processing programs.

trout wrote:Hi, I have a 3.2 megapixel camera and like to crop certain parts of my highest resolution pictures. However, I obviously lose quality the smaller down I go. Is there a plugin that can help me with this problem, or do I just need a higher resolution camera? Thanks.

There is a website called www.fredmiranda.com where you can download an Action he has created which can be used in Photoshop. It enlarges images and in my opinion actually improves them in some instances, the larger it gets. Costs about $15 but it's well worth it.

We had a discussion on upsizing images already. See http://www.graphicsgalaxy.com/forums/th ... .php?t=257

Using bicubic interpolation for upsizing images produces quite good result. If you want a slightly better quality you can look at tools using Lanczos interploation, at S-Spline and Genuine Fractals.

Never heared about Imagener before. The free Standard version only seems to be available at download.com and not on the companies web site. I just downloaded and gave it a try.

The "Kneson Progressive" and "Kneson" methods looks worse to me than "Bicubic". because they soften the image too much. I would recommend using "Bicubic" instead which is also available in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.