Better and cleaner fine detail, more nicely delineated edges. Photographs upsampled in Photoshop to my printer's native resolution look distinctly better than those left to the printer's ministrations. It pays to occasionally recheck one's beliefs. A dozen years ago, I was probably right, but a dozen years is forever in the digital technology world. I needed to test out his assertion on my P800 printer, with Photoshop.īig surprise (not), Jeff turned out to be right. I'm not going to ignore his four-year-old results in favor of my twelve, nuh uh. They are two different products with two different development teams, so they may or may not share the same upsampling code.īut…Jeff is another one of those Great Printing Experts, and 95% of the time we're in agreement (especially around the recommended settings for the Epson 3880 printer to produce the very best quality). Jeff noted that that didn't mean that another program (or printer) would yield the same results. Jeff, printing from Lightroom to an Epson 3880 printer, found that files upsampled from their native resolution to 360 or 720 PPI in Lightroom printed out distinctly more sharply than those upsampled by the Epson print driver. I haven't been induced to change my practices.Įxcept-a few years back, I watched a conversation between Jeff Schewe and Michael Reichmann. In the years since then third-party programs have improved, but so has Photoshop. For the heck of it, I checked out the notion that upsampling to a printer's native resolution (360 or 720 PPI in the case of Epson other manufacturers may be different) produced a higher quality print then letting the printer's driver handle this (which it does behind the scenes when you hand it something of a different PPI). The takeaway, if all that is seriously longissimus, non legi is that the improvements were modest, nothing was superior under all circumstances, and Photoshop's built-in resizing algorithms worked, on average, as well as anything else.

It also seems to be fundamentally misapplied-the times when I do need sharpening output are when I'm printing very small, not very large, as the printer rendering algorithms tend to suppress very fine, low-contrast detail.Īs for upsampling, I gave that a thorough inspection about a dozen years back in these very pages: Sharpening for output has, for me, translated into harsh, unrealistic edges and a degradation of what I would (imprecisely) call photographic quality. I am, for the most part, not a fan of 'sharpening for output' nor of upsampling programs.

Photoshop gigapixel