holt_607-361.tifIn the stock photo Archive, I keep high res photos ready for clients to download.  The digital age makes all this possible.  The days of sending envelopes of slides to publishers now seems utterly prehistoric.  But; I have well over 200,000 slides that will never see publication now that every every single client only reviews digital images.

So, in recent years I have transitioned a lot of older photos, pre digital slide images, into a Royalty Free Collection that are licensed inexpensively.  I scan a few myself every so often myself on my trusty Nikon 5000 scanner, but they will never be the same quality as the amazing digital files of the Canon 5D.

Every so often though, a client really likes one of those older photos and wants to use it larger than the scanner will allow.  This happened today when a customer wanted a background photo for a trade show booth, and needed an inexpensive photo that could be enlarged to ten feet wide, mural size.  With a good digital file, a photo can be interpolated upward and looks great, assuming the viewing distance is commensurate with the image size, but this backyard prairie garden was not going to work.

Enter Photoshop and Topaz Labs filters, here the Simplify plug in.  By transitioning the photo to an illustration, pixels and grain structure virtually disappear.

Before and After Slider

Mural size is now 21600 pixels wide and I can make the greens green.