Up sizeing an image need help saving a sale

I have an image of a moose that has sold as a 31x40 print, taken with a D2x in raw format iso 100, I open it in Bridge and down at the bottom I select Adobe RGB 16 bit 4081 by 6144 (25.1MP) 300ppi, open it to Photoshop Cs5, make some small adjustments using curves and shadow/highlights do a small crop mostly off the top to get it to 31x40, I leave the resolution empty, add smart sharpen 100% -1.5 px- lens blur, save as JPG in highest settings and upload, they tell me its too pix elated to print ?  What am I doing wrong ?   image at http://fineartamerica.com/featured/teto ... ngley.html
I would appreciate any advice, don't want to lose a sale!
thanks
Gary

Gary, I had a look and one key issue is that the original is blurry, something that the FAA pre-printing inspection specifically looks for. It looks like the image suffers from a jostle to the camera or some other form of camera motion blur right when the exposure was taken -- every detail & edge on the moose is doubled, which robs resolution and clarity when enlarging to bigger print sizes.

The image is also a bit more grainy than it needs to be, since it looks like the sharpening was applied to the entire image rather than just the parts of the moose that could benefit. But that's a lot simpler to correct. In particular, everything in the background or foreground that's blurred due to being outside the depth of field should not be sharpened if you want the cleanest looking results. I'd redo the sharpening by applying it to a layer, and then masking the effect to apply only to the parts of the moose that need sharpening.

But prior to sharpening, you'd really need to see if you could correct some of the blurring first. Trying a more specialized deblurring tool might help a bit here; something like Topaz InFocus or similar. Just doing a basic up-sizing and sharpening operation in Photoshop will only serve to enhance the double-exposure look coming from the camera motion. A deblurring tool attempts to reverse some of the camera blur, though realistically can't fully repair the loss of information in the original exposure. But if you can reduce the blurring even a little, sharpening afterwards won't magnify the doubling effect so much.

Even with that I'm unsure if the image could be recovered to the point where the enlargement would pass FAA's inspection for a 40-inch wide print. You & your customer's expectations may be okay with it, but you can't override FAA's decision other than by improving the image. In that case your next best bet would be to clean up the file as best you can and then print it elsewhere & ship directly to your customer.

Thanks Royce
they seem to think its fine up to 20 x 25 so I guess I will pull it, I had hoped I was doing something wrong in PS guess it was in camera, looking back at meta it was 1/40th shutter so I guess that explains alot , I will work on the mask and sharpen in the future, Thanks for your help !

Hi Royce , I could be way off the mark here but a D2X would't it be pushing it at 40 inches on the best of days with a perfect file?particully with a shot with all the fine detail of your moose shot .Cheers Gary

Yeah, 1/40s on this exposure likely combined with a small camera jiggle to create the blurred double-image effect. At smaller print sizes the doubled edges will be less apparent, and the noise also will not be as evident. But 40 inches is up there; the bigger you print, the more any defects in the source file get magnified.

I wouldn't say a D2X shot would be overly pushing it at 40 inches. The camera's native resolution has 4288 pixels on the long side, so for a 40 inch print that's still about 107 PPI of resolution hitting the paper. It's not going to look pin-sharp if you put your eyeball 2 inches from the paper, but at the distance a 40 inch print would be viewed I think it would likely be acceptable to many people. If the original file was well exposed, sharply focused, and processed well, and then printed by somebody that knows what they're about, I reckon in many cases it would be workable.

The FAA print inspection will reject a lot of orders that don't meet their criteria for what's likely to please the customer, as this thread demonstrates. But they will accept print orders that involve enlargement to a limit of around 100 PPI. Up-sizing any more than that, they won't do.

Thanks Royce, you have been very helpful and I appreciate it, I am curious if the image had been Tack sharp then the process I describe would have worked ok ? with the masking you mentioned.

Yes, I think so. The real challenge with printing this image big is that the original has lost roughly half its effective resolution in the area that counts -- the moose -- due to the blurry double-image effect. Without that problem, a straight forward round of noise reduction & selective sharpening would let this print at quite a size, quite probably right up to this 40" attempted size.

Thanks again, I always wonder about using the crop tool and setting in 300 resolution, would that work? especially on a large crop?
thanks
Gary

Doing that in the crop tool will cut out the section of the image you've indicated, and then upsize it using the default interpolation method (usually Bicubic). This is the same as if you just cropped the image without specifying a resolution, and then went into Image > Image Size and upsized manually yourself using Bicubic. There will be no difference in the end, using either approach.

Both of these, in turn, would be more or less equivalent to just printing the image yourself from Photoshop without upsizing it first, because nearly the first thing the printer driver will do is upsize the image it's given to the final print resolution. The advantage of upsizing the image yourself is you have better control over the process, and can apply another round of sharpening after the interpolation which can improve the appearance of the print. Interpolation usually robs image definition & clarity because fake pixels are being manufactured where no original image info existed to really supply that level of resolution; sharpening appropriately after upsizing can counter-act some of the softening effect.

Upsizing your image before uploading it to a service like FAA will backfire with their process, however. That's because their process is oriented to the assumption that you've uploaded files in the native camera resolution, without upsizing or downsizing them first. The FAA printing process does the interpolation for you based on their knowledge of doing decent looking prints.

With other printing services like Mpix and many more, you do have the option of upsizing the image yourself to its final print resolution, and taking a tighter level of control over sharpening the results for that resolution. If you haven't read too deeply about options in sharpening for best print results, you might want to search the forum archives here for 3-stage sharpening workflow. It's been discussed many times and you'll get some insight into possible improvements. But again, some of those moves aren't applicable to FAA because they intend to do the final print resolution upsizing for you.

None of this would deal with the core issue of the image that started this thread. The issue there is the source file simply can't stand up to that level of enlargement unless the blur could be dealt with.

Thanks, realizing this image is lost and for future images would you then be better off not specify a crop size? I usually go with 16x20

The answer is -- it definitely depends. There are too many variables to give a blanket answer. In the case of FAA, you should not interpolate the image before you upload it to them. If you want to crop it strictly to set an aspect ratio that's fine, I frequently use a 4x5 aspect ratio myself. But don't change the resolution of the image, leave the pixels at whatever native resolution they come out of the camera. That's because of the way the FAA printing workflow is organized as I described above.

If you're printing for yourself using an Epson printer for example, the answer would be different. In this case for best results you'd probably want to take a great deal of control over the printing process including upsizing, sharpening at the output resolution, and so on.

If you're printing through another printing service, the answer may be different again, somewhere in between perhaps. Essentially you need to do whatever will work best for the situation at hand, and it varies how much control you have vs. how much the printing service (if any) has...

Thanks Royce, I have a lot of images to redo,
thanks again

If you've uploaded images to FAA that are already upsized, you don't necessarily need to redo them. But you do need to claw back a bunch of the larger sizes that FAA gives you the option to price out in your gallery, and only price out sizes on the smaller end of the spectrum -- up to roughly 100 PPI compared to the original camera file size.

That's because FAA's back-end assumes you've given them native camera resolution files, and extrapolates what larger sizes are likely to produce acceptable print quality. If you've already upsized the images before FAA gets them, then the large sizes they indicate would be double-upsized. This will definitely lead to more rejected orders at those larger sizes because the files are being pushed past the largest size they can really be taken to.

I found the bulk price will let me change the sizes on all of them at once so I cut out the large ones and will try going thru and process and upload them one at a time, I did try your suggestions on this one its about a bigger crop http://fineartamerica.com/featured/bull ... twork=true

The sizes available on that one look appropriate for the file's resolution & clarity. I would say it might be a touch over-sharpened, so at the largest print size the FAA review process might send it back to you with a comment like that. In general, an inkjet print will naturally soften just a touch, as the RGB pixels of the source file are converted into a pattern of much smaller CMYK ink dots on the paper; that can mitigate a bit of the crunchy look that sharpening can introduce though you still don't want overly much "crunch". But in a few spots on the elk you can see some strong dark or white lines outlining edges of relatively high contrast. These are "sharpening halos" and they will become more visible on a larger print plus the output processing FAA does might apply a little extra output sharpening which would further emphasize such halos.

So watch out for those factors. These kinds of things can be addressed by fine-tuning your sharpening methods a bit. Other than that there shouldn't be an issue with this image holding up at 24", which is the largest size you've got configured for it.