Photographs hendersonville

Some of the pictures you take are exceptional. You been doing photography for awhile now, huh?

Let me ask you a picture question you can prolly answer it. But first a wee bit of backstory. When my Wife and I were raising our kids when the were still little when the internet first came online and the digital cameras were starting to come out. So we got a coupe decent ones (over time) and we took a lot of pictures of everything when we went out and we did get a lot of really good pictures.

And so, by the time the kids were grown advances were being made to the cameras Higher quality pictures and so forth. But our pictures look good so everybody happy, lol.

Then the kids finally moved out and then the Wife jumped ship too. And then the Lord had one of our board members (here) tell me to give my business to my son and move back here to Ohio where I still have some family. (That's a whole 'nother thread cuz I didn't want to move to Ohio! But I was scared not too cuz the Lord gave me confirmation that, this is the real deal. So with Jonah on my mind I moved here. Next thing I know my dad calls me with 2 weeks to live and he wanted me to come help him for his last bit of time, so that he could die at home in his own bed and not at some facility.

When I walked into the front door here, on the foyer wall is a wall mural of a beach scene. Water beach trees n stuff. It looks good but I'm not much of a beach guy. I'm more mountain man, and I had seen a couple ads about they make custom wall murals now from your own pictures for 300 something bucks. Just upload your picture to their site and give them the wall dimensions and soon you have a nice wall mural. I had plenty of good Colorado pics so jumped on it. I picked a nice picture of Pikes Peak in the background and Garden of the Gods in the foreground and a nice blue sky.

Long story short they kicked my picture back to me and said it was too low quality to be blown up and still look good...Darn it! I'm stuck at the beach instead of my familiar mountains.

But it's been awhile and I heard it through the grapevine that there is a way to easily up the quality in low pixel pics. But didn't know the name of it. Supposedly it's an app. So...have you ever heard of such a thing or know what it's called or anything?

The Mural place told me the oics should be a minimum of 20 mega pixel camera. That let cell phones out. I priced new cameras with those specs and they're dancing around 1000 bucks or more. Plus I'd have to go visit Colorado again (or send the camera to my kids.) So I doubt that.

But, could it be done on an App so I could still use my pictures that I have, or was that guy pulling my leg?

Edward said:

But it's been awhile and I heard it through the grapevine that there is a way to easily up the quality in low pixel pics. But didn't know the name of it. Supposedly it's an app. So...have you ever heard of such a thing or know what it's called or anything?

Click to expand...

There's a lot of manipulation you can do, but nothing will make a 5 MP camera produce a wall mural. But there is a way to do it beforehand. Microsoft makes freeware called Microsoft Image Composite Editor. What ever scene you want, get close enough that only a small portion of it fits in your camera viewfinder. Then take a series of pictures carefully rotating the camera without actually changing its position, until you have partial pictures of everything you want in the image. Be sure the partial images overlap a lot. Then you can put those partial images into the app, and it makes one big composite picture. With a lot more megapixels.


This one was taken with a cell phone (maybe a dozen images). Has about 41MP.


The final image won't be circular, unless you happen to want that. There are options in the app for that kind of thing.

The issue is that you only get the information on each pixel. And it only has so many bits of information. My Pentax KP has 24 bits per pixel, but older cameras had fewer.

Some rather clever programs can "improve resolution" by algorithms that infer data from the exist pixels. This "interpolation" works, kinda; Photoshop has seven different apps to do it, but none of them really improve quality of the image.

If your camera allows you to store pictures as TIFF files rather than the low-information JPG files, that would also help.

And there are a lot of processing tricks to make an image look better than it actually is. Those are more of an art than a science. And now you know more then you probably wanted to know. If you actually want a quality wall-size image, your best bet (aside from putting out maybe $1700 for a top-level prosumer camera) would be to download Microsoft ICE and learn to use it. If you do, I'll be happy to put together a tutorial to make it easier.

Yes, there are issues. Tiffs are much more data intensive than Jpegs, because Jpegs use a compressed algorithm. And so they degrade every time you copy and save them. Not by much, but enough. A lot better than bitmaps, though.

What do you normally use? I find that GIMP freeware plus a couple of other programs, do everything I need.

jasonc said:

I like gnu but file conversions are hard .

Click to expand...

In GIMP, just put up the JPEG, chose "Export as" and then name the file, adding the "tiff" extension. It will then ask you what compression, if any, you want. Best to chose "none", if you want maximum quality. And that does it.