Xl1S Stills Posted

[Don Williamson]

I've uprezzed and sharpened numerous still frame grabs taken with my XL1 in Frame Movie Mode. You capture your footage. Make your "freeze frame" still. Export it as a QuickTime still photo. Here's where the magic begins. If you do not already have it, get Genuine Fractals 2.0, a Photoshop plugin. Open your still photo in Photoshop. Crop it to the size you want. Save it as a Genuine Fractals file. Open that file and decide what size and resolution you want the photo to be. You check this off in the Genuine Fractals dialogue box that appears. Then open the image as a Genuine Fractals/Photoshop document. The image can be as large as your want. Your only limitation is the amount of RAM you have. If you have less than 256 megs of RAM, forget it! You want at least 256+ megs of RAM. More RAM = bigger possible image. Do your image tweaking till you get just what you want. If you use layers, it's no longer Genuine Fractals. To save it as "fractals" you must flatten the image. You can make giant blow ups from your mini DV camera stills, if you wish. I've made some amazing prints on my old Epson Photo 1200. You could make composites of still shots, uprezz them, then import them in your video editing program for pan and scan. The possibilities are unlimited. It does blow people's minds to see a sharp 8x11 still photo you took with your XL1. they'll think you took it with a Nikon35 mm SLR (heh, heh)!

[Bill Ravens]

great lead, Don. Thanx, I'll give it a try.....*very interested*

[Joe Redifer]

Don-

Do you think it would be possible to post a before (XL1 original) and after (processed with Genuine Fractals) shots for us to study? I'd love to see the results.

[Bill Ravens]

Joe...

Check out this site for images.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/fractals.htm

[Rob Lohman]

This article doesn't really concur with Don's view of
things. Perhaps it would be interesting to see some
stills from him indeed.

[Steve Nunez]

As a long time user of Genuine Fractals and heavy into digital photography with a pro SLR (Kodak DCS620/ Digital Nikon F5) I feel right at home in this area of discussion.......

..the problem with Genuine Fractals is that the Altimira Group (the people who designed GF) designed it to perform interpolation logs with the available pixel information and res the image up using a very good "averaging" technique...problem is, it's really optiized for images with large file sizes (hi-res) and doesn't work well for the small res images that the XL produces....it's great with digital cameras such as the D30 (Canon) that have 3+ megapixel ccd's.....even the DCS series of cameras that were 2mp didn't see much benefit running GF as opposed to Photoshop's own bi-cubic interpolation......a good alternative is an action in PS that's available from Steve's-Digicam's (he reviewed it) that upsampled images (works great with smaller files)- it was called "Stair's Interpolation- something like that.....

GF was designed to increase image dimensions primarily for print use.....it will work on XL images but not any better than PS's own bicubic interpolation method.

I think the XL does a good job at capturing small photos for web use- but even a $259 digital camera will outperform it.....hey- Canon could have not put a "Photo" option on it- but it's cool that they did!

(by the way- alot of digital cameras these days have avi capabilities- but no one expects to shoot real footage with them- just there for kicks and added sales literature advertisement.)

Have fun- you only live once.

[Don Williamson]

Thanks for the interesting replies. It's true. Genuine Fractals is primarily for print use, or, as I mentioned, for uprezzing images you might want to pan and scan in a video editor like Final Cut Pro. It can't add detail to the photo that was never there. But it doesn't just add pixels. It also shapes them naturalistically. When you enlarge a Genuine Fractals modified image, you don't get blocky pixels but smooth gradations, much like an artist's brush on an oil painting. I am not aware Photoshop can do that! I use it to enlarge photos I scan for a documentary/educational video project I am doing. I can scan a snapshot size photo in at 1200 (or greater) dpi. I then fractalize it. I can uprezz it more if desired. Then I reduce the size of the image from, say, 5"x7" to less than 1/2 that size so the file isn't too large. I can then export it as a medium quality JPEG for pan and scan in FCP. I've done beautiful pans and zooms on snapshots that look great, even on a large screen TV. We're talking Ken Burns documentary quality here, except for the fact that he uses 16 mm film, which is technically better than DV video (and much more expensive to shoot). At present, I don't have a web site for posting sample photos. Though I could email one. On your computer monitor you're only going to get 72 dpi.

[Michael Rosenberger]

I own the XL-1S and a GL-1. For stills I prefer the GL-1 for its' sharpness and contrast. Have compared it to other cameras and IMO it is one of the best for digital images...barring using and actuall digital camera.

As for compression and such. The general grabs I have used were similar in softness to those in the link. Not so much compression, but more the way the XL-1S shoots. Now, agreed that if one was looking at the XL-1S for still images then you would want to post full resolution, full size images for comparison.

I can grab some frames of different situations if anyone is interested. Near, far, high contrast, bright, dark. Let me know.