Comparing Upsizers

I have been upsizing my files with Fred Miranda's action for the Canon D30. This works by increasing the size of the file, using Photoshop's image size command, by a series of increments instead of in one go. This was supposed to give better resolution.

I then read an article in the magazine, Professional Photographer, which claimed, with supporting evidence, that Fred Miranda's technique gave worse results than upsizing in one operation.

Recently, I have read and heard, from a number of sources, that Photoshop CS's upsizing is much better than in previous versions, and I decided to find out for myself where the truth lies.

I started with this rather dark, unprocessed 16 bit TIFF file from my Canon 10D, about 37MB.

I then upsized it to about 95MB, the size of file which I would want to send to the photo library, Alamy, when reduced to 8 bits. I did so by three methods:

I then took a crop from the badger's snout at 100% for each method :

Photoshop 6.0 bicubic.

 

Photoshop 6.0 with Fred Miranda's action

 

Photoshop CS's bicubic smoother.

 

I think that Miranda's action gives the best result. What do YOU think?

The results may well vary with different types of image, but I have repeated the exercise with another image with similar results. I would like to hear from anyone else who repeats this test or anything like it, because it seems to me that rumour abounds in this area, when it is quite simple to form an opinion based on our own evidence.

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