Bridge CS2 question

SloYerRoll

I use Bridge to open up RAW files in Bridge instead of PS for a bunch of obvious reasons.
Question is: there is an option to save the files in a larger format than the file was originally shot in. Not to make things any less confusing, the field where you determine what resolution is an open text field. It's not like I can create a 6144 x 4085 shot @ 1200 ppi magically.....

Any light shed on this would be greatly appreciated.

-Jon

DavidTO

Just leave it alone.

SloYerRoll

DavidTO wrote:

Just leave it alone.

I would, but I have this propensity to push buttons if I don't know what they do.

Thanks for the reply DavidTO.

jfriend

An explanation

SloYerRoll wrote:

I use Bridge to open up RAW files in Bridge instead of PS for a bunch of obvious reasons.
Question is: there is an option to save the files in a larger format than the file was originally shot in. Not to make things any less confusing, the field where you determine what resolution is an open text field. It's not like I can create a 6144 x 4085 shot @ 1200 ppi magically.....

Any light shed on this would be greatly appreciated.

-Jon

Here's a long answer to your inquiry.

The size field tells ACR to scale your image when it's saved or passed to Photoshop. If you pick a size that's more pixels than it's native size, then ACR will upscale the image to that number of pixels. There's no free lunch. Detail isn't created from scratch, but you will end up with more pixels.

The resolution field is just a label that's attached to the file. If you put in 1200 ppi and you image is 2400x3600 pixels (just to pick some round numbers), then some software will think your image is meant to be 2" x 3" (2x1200=2400 and 3x1200=3600). Again, this 2"x3" dimension is just a label on the image. It doens't really mean much and you can completely ignore it. The only two things that I know of that use this dimension are:

1. If you print and don't tell the printing software how large you want your printed image, some software will default to using the tagged size. If you do specify that you want a specific size (like 4"x6" which is always what I do), then the tagged size is completely ignored.
2. When you add some text in PS to an image and you pick a specific point size (e.g. 14 pt), Photoshop has to use some sort of size reference to know how large to make the 14pt font. in this case, it uses the labeled size dimension on the image.

Since I always tell my printing programs how big I want my output image and I almost never add text to my images and even if I do add text, I can just change the size to taste, I have never found any reason to worry about the labeled size or resolution on an image.

To see how little this labeled size actually matters, you can freely change it in PS. Just go to Image/Image Size. Uncheck the [ ] Resample Image checkbox. Then change the width of the image to 100" and see how the height and resolution changes. Then change the resolution to 1200ppi and see how the height and width change. You can change any of these and the actual pixels in your image won't be changed one bit (as long as the resample image checkbox is off).

01af

SloYerRoll wrote:

I use Bridge to open up raw files in Bridge instead of PS for a bunch of obvious reasons. Question is: There is an option to save the files in a larger format than the file was originally shot in. [...] Any light shed on this would be greatly appreciated.

First: Your question has nothing to do with the fact that you are opening your raw files with Camera Raw hosted in Bridge rather than in Photoshop. You'll be presented with the option to upscale or downscale your files in any case. Bridge itself cannot do raw conversions. But it can invoke the Camera Raw plug-in, just as Photoshop would.

Upscaling adds pixels to your file through interpolation. New pixels are made up, and their values are computed from the values of the surrounding actual pixels. So there won't be more detail, just more pixels. This is useful for very-large-format output. Normally, however, you don't want to upscale your image files.

Rather than doing the upscaling in Camera Raw, you can achieve the very same result after the raw conversion through upscaling in Photoshop using resampling method 'Bicubic Smoother' (see Image > Image Size). Doing it immediately in Camera Raw simply saves you a step in your workflow. But doing it in Photoshop has several advantages:

1. You can postpone the upscaling until after you did the rest of your editing so you don't need to handle a huge file with is awkward to do.

2. The upscaling feature of Camera Raw offers only three or four steps; the upscaling feature of Photoshop can do any arbitrary size.

3. The upscaling feature of Camera Raw adds a certain kind of artifacts to the upscaled file. The artifacts are minuscule and very hard to detect but they are there. Photoshop-upscaled files are free from that particular kind of artifacts.

By the way, it is often recommended to do the upscaling in several small steps rather than in one single leap. With Photoshop's current resampling methods, that's obsolete advice from the past. It's better to do it in one step using the resampling method 'Bicubic Smoother.' In case you're wondering ... resampling method 'Bicubic Sharper' is for downscaling, 'Bilinear' is for graphic files rather than continuous-tone images (aka photographs), and 'Nearest Neighbor' is for line drawings (e. g. diagrams and such).

If you want to add some sharpening to the upscaled image, upscale using 'Bicubic Smoother' to a size 20 % larger than what you really need, then downscale to the final size using 'Bicubic Sharper.' The result will be a simplified version of what's known as 'fractal sharpening.'

-- Olaf