How Many Pixels Do I Need?

That's a common question that we hear. To answer it you need to know two things, the size of the print you need to make and the resolution that your printer needs for the best results.

The size of the print is simply however large your printer can handle. The resolution that your printer needs may be a little trickier to figure out. Resolution is the density of the pixels for a given distance, usually measured in pixels or dots per inch. Most modern inkjet printers print anywhere from 1200 to 4800 dots per inch (what the printer manufacturers really mean is 1200-4800 droplets of ink per inch). Inkjet printers use many tiny round droplets of relatively few, 4-8 ink colors to reproduce one square pixel in your image that could be any of millions of colors. A common mistake is to set the resolution of the file to the resolution of the printer. In all but a few special printers this will result in huge files that will not print well, if at all.

The secret is that the human eye can not see much more than 250-300 pixels per inch. So the ideal resolution for your files should be close to this and be an even multiple of the printers resolution. See the chart below for recommendations on resolution settings for common printers.

Once you know the print size and resolution it is easy to use Genuine Fractals 5 to resize your file to the desired output. Simply input the resolution and then either the print width or height. You'll see that the corresponding dimension is automatically filled in by Genuine Fractals 5 based on the proportions of your image.

Keep the proportions in mind because the proportions of films, digital camera sensors and papers can all be different. For example most digital cameras sensors are proportioned so that the height is two thirds the width or 1:1.5; While the most common paper size, in the US, is letter which is 8.5x11 inches or a about 1:1.25.

These kinds of proportion mis-matches are common and require that the original image be cropped to fit the proportions of the paper size. If your image cannot be cropped without ruining the composition then you will need to adjust your print size to longer dimension.

Why should I use Genuine Fractals 5?

Resizing an image larger than the original size requires that new pixels be created. This process is called interpolation or up-rezzing. There are many mathematical ways, called algorithms, to do this. The most common method used by default by many pixel editing applications is called Bicubic Interpolation. Bicubic along with with its newer variants bicubic smoother and bicubic sharper work by averaging a small group of neighboring pixels to determine the color value of the new pixels to be added. While this technique is fast, it does not distinguish edges so there is a uniform loss of sharpness and detail across the image.

Genuine Fractals 5 patented algorithms work differently. As a Photoshop plug-in, it starts by analyzing ever-decreasing sizes of pixel blocks in your image looking for repeating natural patterns at different sizes. These are known as fractals. Fractals are common, naturally repeating patterns found everywhere. For example, a river system viewed from space has the same shape as the veins in a leaf. These are both fractal patterns at very different scales. The great thing about fractal patterns is once you find them they can be scaled to any size without loss in detail. This allows Genuine Fractals 5 to resize your image over 1000% without losing sharpness and edge detail.

Unmatched Image Resizing

Genuine Fractals 5 can resize your images over 1000% and still maintain sharp edges and minute details. To give you an idea of how big that is, you could take a full-frame image from a six megapixel image and resize it to make a print of 10x15 feet at 180 ppi! It is a must for any photographer or artist who makes large format or poster sized prints.

It is also great for journalists, sports and wildlife photographers who may need to take a cropped section of an image and still make a high-quality print from it. Cropping can leave you with very few pixels to work with.

If you were to crop this professional 12 megapixel image to keep just the antelope you would be left with only four megapixels of information, barely enough to make a good 5x7 print. However with Genuine Fractals 5 you could make a print over 6 feet tall.

Save Hard Disk Space and Bandwidth

Increasing the size and resolution of a file results in a larger file on disk. You can reduce the disk space needed and bandwidth when transferring files by saving your files into the Genuine Fractals 5 .STN format which provides lossless and visually lossless wavelet compression to cut your file size in half or more. Now you can store twice as many images on your hard drive and upload them in half the time. Long time users of Genuine Fractals remember having to save files as a .STN file before being able to scale the image. In Genuine Fractals 5, any file that is opened in Photoshop can be scaled in one easy step without having to save as a .STN file first.

Broad File Support

 

If you work in a strict CMYK color workflow and need to increase the resolution of your images, look no further than Genuine Fractals Print Pro 5. Based on the same fractal-based scaling method as the standard edition of Genuine Fractals 5, Genuine Fractals Print Pro 5 adds support for CMYK images in addition to RGB, LAB and Grayscale images. Learn more about Genuine Fractals Print Pro 5.

Batch Processing with Genuine Fractals 5

Genuine Fractals 5 is a Photoshop automation plug-in and therefore can be automated easily by using a Photoshop action. By default, Genuine Fractals 5 remembers its last used setting - however, you can create a Photoshop action to resize an entire folder of images at the same time. Learn how to use Genuine Fractals 5 in a Photoshop action.

Not Just for Photographers

Genuine Fractals 5 is not just for Photographers, but anyone who needs to resize images. Graphic designers can use this Photoshop plug-in to end the everyday problem of receiving low resolution images from clients for high resolution print work. Genuine Fractals 5 can also help you create tradeshow and billboard graphics from average sized images. Genuine Fractals 5 is also commonly used by service bureaus as well as law enforcement and architects for resizing small files.

Customer Tesitmonials

"My preliminary results are superb (with Genuine Fractals 5). And as an added bonus, you don't make me flatten the image, an unexpected bonus. Great job guys! Great Job! Sincerely, Photographer who feels his money was wisely spent..." - Rich G.

"I stand amazed at Genuine Fractals!!!! I am a professional photographer who recently found myself facing the probability of refunding a customer nearly 1,000 on a print order because her images had been saved mistakenly at a very low resolution by an assistant of mine. I found you online, and after first trying the free trial and having the images printed---even as large as a 20 x 24--I was beyond impressed. Needless to say, I have purchased the program, and without a doubt would recommend it to any professional photographer out there. You never know when you might need it. Thanks onOne Software!" - Melanie B.

"I just used Genuine Fractals 5 for the first time, and I LOVE IT! I have many older images that were scanned in at a small size, thus when I enlarge them they fall apart. Now they look great! Thanks so much for a great product." - Rick S.

"Great Software! I don't know what you could do to improve it, now that it's 16 bit compatible." - Gary E.

"I've been very pleased with Genuine Fractals and I can't thank you enough for such a fine product." - Leighton D.

"After (using the trial version of) Genuine Fractals, I'm pretty thrilled about the results - very impressive!" - Tobias P.