What’s wrong with this picture?

This is a resplendent quetzal I photographed in Costa Rica. It is too small in the frame to make a strong visual statement because it was just outside of telephoto range. What I really wanted, of course, was the image on the next page.

To create this sharp, tightly framed photo, I significantly cropped the original. I used the Canon 1Dx Mark II for the shot because, at full frame, the files from this camera open in Photoshop as a 57 megabyte file. I cropped it down to 8 megs because I wanted to essentially fill the frame with the bird.

The next step was to ‘res-up’ the image so it has many more pixels and, at the same time, appears tack sharp.

Fortunately, we have software now that can accomplish this. Topaz Gigapixel AI interpolates a cropped image and enlarges it to very large file sizes. In this case, I went from 8 megabytes to 125 megabytes within the software. I used the ‘4x’ tab. I could have gone larger, but there was no need.

If you want to make giant prints, however, this is excellent software to use in preparation for the printer.

As you can see, the image reproduces sharply and with complete detail. To size the file for on this page, I reduced it down to 11 megs which makes this even more impressive.