I love ancient comic strips so, on a whim, I decided to have a Sunday panel blown up into a 2’ x 3’ poster. I went to a printing web site and copy & pasted a panel. I didn’t really have high hopes. I knew that I was to just keep enlarging the pic, I’d end up with giant pixels, so I figured the poster would be a little abstracty, which I thought might be cool in itself. What the printer sent me was a beautiful reproduction of the panel- no pixels to be seen, and you can see the texture of the original paper it was printed on, and all the little inkwork details. I’ve since had a couple more pic printed up, and the results are the same. So I put them to the test, and had a Milt Gross panel made into an 8’ x 3’ banner. It looks pretty good! I spray glued it to a sheet of foam and it graces my living room wall. The thing that puzzles me is: where is all the info for these pictures coming from?
Were you operating from an original printed image and not a low-res scan? (I believe you are.)
Typically, computer screen resolution is FAR lower (3x lower, or more) than the resolution required to print a computer file and have it look good. If you started with an image that looks fine on a computer screen then printed it at the same size (for instance, 8 inches wide onscreen then 8 inches wide on paper) it would look a lot less nice.
However, the original image, if in printed form, may have a lot more pixel information / density than a computer image. This image could then be scanned by a good, high-resolution scanner, then you could blow it up and print it and it would look good.
For instance, I have heard that photographic film captures images at very high resolution, if you were to think of it in computer image terms. One example: someone at Kodak said 35mm film had the equivalent of 6000 pixel resolution horizontally. Cite
ETA: I guess where I am headed with this discussion is the idea that an newspaper or any printing process probably created images that would be plenty high by today’s standards, using “older” technology. No doubt someone here can explain the process of imaging in the world of printed newspapers.
There’s a wide range of software that will depixellate images, and I would imagine that it’s extremely effective on relatively simple images like cartoons. “Enhance”! Obviously it can’t really do the CSI trope thing, it’s all interpolation.
Which makes a frame of 35mm a mind-boring 24 megapixels. That’s medium-ish resolution today.
I think back then, too. At least, one of my friends paid a lot of money for a medium-format camera. I was basically content with my 35 mm Ektachrome (still available!!) and T-Max 3200.
My 35 mm Nikon Coolpix fit in my hand, snapped pics across Paris and Spain. Then had excellent results upsizing several images to poster size. I found an online print source and uploaded my pics of The Sagrada Familia taken from a 1/4 mile away (from the basement door to the unfinished towers and ocean beyond) and graffitied government doors up close in Mafrid. The crispness and clarity were amazing.
Any chance you could link us to the panel you copied/pasted? There are various possible explanations for the lack of pixelization, and I’d be interested in seeing your source material.
I’m reading and posting on a 2015 iPad, If I click on the OP’s name to see an enlarged view of his icon, I can then zoom in on that icon (the wolf in a tuxedo) using a “reverse pinch”… and get a decent image at 8x enlargement.
So with half the icon filling pretty much my entire screen, the pixelization is not a major problem.
He’s talking about seeing the texture of the paper. I think he was just working from a very high resolution scan.
Any chance you could link us to the panel you copied/pasted? There are various possible explanations for the lack of pixelization, and I’d be interested in seeing your source material.
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To tell you the truth, I’m not sure where I got the panels I had enlarged- I just copied and pasted.