[Leica] Q2

[Howard L Ritter Jr]

Yes, I understand all the primary figures. But because I’ve seen such good results with Gigapixel and Sharpen AI, the 12 Mp 56mm image looks convincingly like a 48 Mp file. And a crop equivalent to a 90mm lens would look convincingly like an 18 Mp file after up-res’ing and sharpening. As far as I know, the Q2 firmware doesn’t do any interpolation in its digital zoom, and actually stores the full-frame image file. It merely displays and enlarges to fill the screen with the respective central 3:2 rectangles containing the pixels that correspond to 35, 50, and 75mm.

Everything in the third paragraph of my post below was set in the context of up-res’ing and sharpening with the current best tools for those purposes, not the misconception that the camera supplies the same 47 Mpx at all ‘different’ focal lengths. I understand that resolution, strictly speaking, cannot be increased computationally when it was not there optically. But I’ve been experimenting with up-res’ing in PS ever since I got my M8 donkeys’ years ago, and it’s my conclusion that in nature, the structure of images is often systematic, or autocorrelated from point to point, and not random, and that therefore interpolation often produces an apparent increase in resolution that is not in fact misleading – think of the stairstepped and slightly blurry edge of a twig, or a leg, or a telephone wire at the level where the individual pixels start to be visible. Interpolating to increase the pixel dimensions by a factor of 2 produces a smoother border that in mimics what’s there in reality, and looks like what would be shown by a sensor of 4x the areal pixel density. Of course, if there’s a tiny hair sticking out from the surface of the twig, the up-res process misses that, which is why I took care to say that the up-res’ed image 'looks convincingly’ like a higher-res primary image.

Now, it’s quite another thing that the “AI” attached to the names of the software, and the way the process is described by the publisher, suggests that the software looks for analogous features in a huge library of images and adapts those features to the up-res and sharpening processes. Whether this is kosher is a very legitimate question that hinges not only on the process but on individual ideas of when an image is no longer just being sharpened and made less noisy, etc., computationally, but is crossing into being unacceptably transformed into something it was not by pulling elements out of cyberspace and using them to inform the image.

I relish a cognitive dissonance in which I welcome the new technology while retaining my love of analog WYSIWYG black-and-white photography. I’ll never part with my M3 or R9. I respect as well that others get different mileage.

—howard

> On Jun 12, 2021, at 11:25 PM, Frank Filippone via LUG <lug at leica-users.org> wrote:
> 
> DO you realize you have 47MP at 28mm.  If you have the "lens" set to 75mm, you have a significantly lower resolution..... ?
> 
> Quick calcs tell me at (28x2) 56 mm, you have 12MP.
> 
> Now maybe they are doing some interpolation or other computer wizardry, but it is a fixed 28mm lens and a fixed 47mp sensor.
> 
> NO magic can change this optical reality.
> 
> You do NOT have 47mp at 75mm...... not directly in the optical sense.....
> 
> Computational Photography is the new .... Specmanship trickster.....
> 
> 
> Frank Filippone
> BMWRed735i at Gmail.com
> On 6/12/2021 4:48 PM, Howard L Ritter Jr via LUG wrote:
>> I just recently tried out Gigapixel as well as the new PS Enhance feature. I’ve only compared one image file so far, one with a fir tree in the center and lots of needles to test the resolution.
>> 
>> GP is the clear winner over PS.
>> 
>> As far as cropping and enlarging to mimic a longer lens goes, the Q2 image up-res’ed and cropped, both by a factor of 2, to mimic a 47 Mpx 56mm image, is strikingly superior to a primary 50mm 42 MPx image. I have not yet up-res’ed the Sony image, but I expect it to be correspondingly better, but that would be wasted storage space except for the exceptional image that’s going to be made into a 4’ x 6’ poster – the take-home point is that if a 47 Mpx file has all the resolution I’ll ever need and ~50mm all the longer a lens, then the Q2 hits the sweet spot for me. Actually, since 15-20 Mpx might do it (15 looks fabulous at 13 x 21 inches on my 250-dpi iMac), then the Q2 gives me the equivalent of ~ 90mm.
>> 
>>> On Jun 12, 2021, at 5:55 PM, Ken Carney via LUG <lug at leica-users.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I have used Gigapixel since it came out and it works as advertised, though it needs a stout graphics card, at least 4gb vram, 8 is better.  Since Photoshop and Lightroom now come with a similar app,2x Super Resolution, you might get the trial version of Gigapixel and compare.  They look the same to me.
>>> 
>>> Sent from my iPad
>>> 
>>>> On Jun 12, 2021, at 10:57 AM, Howard L Ritter Jr via LUG <lug at leica-users.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> .
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
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> 
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