Fractals

Genuine Fractals is the program of choice for digital photographers who want big beautiful blow-ups without loss of image quality. It works so well and seems so straightforward that three of the four professionals (Jill Enfield, Justin Guariglia and Rick Sammon) who contributed images for this piece consider Genuine Fractals to be an indispensable tool but a boring topic of conversation.

The fourth shooter, Vincent Versace, begs to differ about the boring part. Versace played a key role in directing Genuine Fractals towards the digital photography market. He has taken a long look ‘under the hood’ and thinks that GF can expand your consciousness as much as, or even more than, your images. In the fractal math that drives the program, Versace finds insights into chaos, order, the universal laws of nature, and even the ‘thumbprint of God.’

Saving the deep thinking for the end of our discussion, let’s start by explaining why Genuine Fractals is the best solution to the problem of enlarging or ‘up-rezing’ digital images. As anyone who has tried to super-size images from a digital photo knows, picture-quality starts to decline beyond a certain stage of enlargement. Jagged lines, blurred edges and miscellaneous data (called artifacts) are among the problems. According to Mark Jaress, the software wizard who conceived the idea for Genuine Fractals, ‘Everything digital involves discreet increments-- 1,2,3, 4. When you start scaling digital images, those discrete areas show up as defects. A true fractal is not digital; it’s analog, more like nature, a continuous flow, an infinite link between 1 and 2. Mathematicians call this infinite stepping ‘transcendental numbers.’ By eliminating discrete steps, fractals give you a more highly scalable image.’ Resizing with bicubic sampling (above) versus using Genuine Fractals (below)

Jill Enfield, a respected fine art, editorial and commercial shooter, proves that you don’t have to be a digital manipulation maven to get good use out of Genuine Fractals. Enfield prefers hands-on techniques with deep roots in the history of photography to the current craze for computer retouching. In her efforts to spread knowledge of historical processes, she has taught hand-coloring and historical printing techniques at Parsons and other top design schools. She has even written a book of complete instructions for such 19th and early 20th -century processes as cyanotype, kallitype, Van Dyke Brown and tintype (Photo-Imaging, A Complete Guide To Alternative Processes.) Her work in these media has also been widely displayed, collected and published.

‘I think the computer is a wonderful tool, and I’ve embraced the digital age,’ Enfield says, ’but I still like to stay grounded in historical techniques. I enjoy the process of printing and coloring my images by hand. People ask ‘Why bother to hand-color when you can do the same thing with Photoshop?’ But even if the results are similar, the creative experience is different for me. Hands-on techniques give me a different level of involvement, satisfaction and connection with the history of photography.’

Enfield’s work often involves ‘a good marriage’ of digital and historical methods. ‘I love the immediacy of the digital image,’ she says, ‘but I’ll often use it to produce a digital negative by inverting the picture and printing it out on a piece of acetate. Once I have a large format negative, I can use historical techniques like cyanotype, print in color or black and white, do whatever I want.’

In her current project, Enfield is not using a digital camera or even film, but she is working with Genuine Fractals. The project is her jill enfield church

first venture into portraiture and shows how her ever-experimental approach blends different eras of photography. She is shooting portraits of a very diverse group of immigrants who came to New York after World War II. Enfield’s own parents fled persecution in Europe during the war, and she is interested in these recent immigrants because they came to the States as a matter of choice, not survival. She is shooting with a 5x7 camera into which she puts glass plates instead of film. She coats the plates with photo-sensitive chemicals in a process called ‘wet collodion.’ (The process was invented way back in 1851 by British photographer Frederick Scott Archer.)

‘I coat the glass plate with collodion,’ Enfield says, ‘dip it in silver, expose it in the camera, then develop and dry it. I shoot with the lens wide open, taking portraits with very low depth of field and movement because of the long exposures. The negatives are the glass plates. They are really soft but show a lot of detail and texture.’

Enfield then scans the plates to create digital images in her computer. ‘I open the files using Genuine Fractals,’ she says, ‘and that allows me to blow them up to very large-scale jill enfield Morocco

imagery. When I use GF, all the original detail and texture is there. Nothing gets lost or distorted.’ Her portraits are usually head-shots, and GF has enabled Enfield to create larger-than-life-size blow ups. The biggest so far was 4x5 feet.

‘My thing is to take these tools, whether they were made in the 19th or 21st century, and utilize them to the best of my ability. I really feel that you have to take a good picture to begin with and then use tools to bring out everything that you put in. That’s what Genuine Fractals does. It allows you to get the best possible print out of the computer. It makes sure that all the information you originally captured is still there when you enlarge the image.’

Justin Guariglia is another talented photographer who uses Genuine Fractals without being a fan of digital manipulation. A frequent contributor to National Geographic, Guariglia is documentary and fine art shooter known for his uncanny ability to immerse himself in Asian cultures. His images capture the timelessness and peace of Eastern philosophy, sometimes contrasting it with the breakneck pace of modern life. Guariglia’s mistrust of manipulation comes from his background in classic documentary techniques. He began shooting as a student of Chinese in Beijing and really learned his craft during an internship with the prestigious Magnum agency.

In his early days as a documentary photographer, Guariglia shot 35mm film and traveled around Asia with a Nikon scanner so he could scan and ship images to editorial clients. He started using Genuine Fractals for the rare occasions when newspapers and magazines were willing to run his images as double-page spreads.

‘I grew up in the school of never doing any manipulation,’ he says. ‘I will adjust colors in Photoshop because sometimes the colors of scanned images don’t match what I captured on film. They may be a little too dark or too light but, to me, that kind of adjustment is not manipulating photographs. It’s the kind of burning and dodging that you normally do in a darkroom. I don’t go much beyond that.’

Now well-known as a documentary shooter, Guariglia finds himself increasingly drawn into the realm of fine art. His focus is less on current events than on the overall context and culture in which events take place. The first exhibit of his fine art work will take place at FotoFest in Houston in March. Entitled Ch’an, the exhibition ‘explores the sense of calm found within a very special group of monks at the Shaolin Temple in China, where Ch’an Buddhism was born and serenity reigns in both a physical and spiritual realm. This body of work attempts to achieve a calming effect by borrowing concepts from the techniques of self-cultivation practiced by these true Ch’an masters and disciples.’

Guariglia used Genuine Fractals to enlarge the pictures for this show from 35mm originals to 40x54-inch prints. ‘In the process of blowing them up,’ he says, ‘Genuine Fractals really does all the work. I just press the automate button in Photoshop, and the function pops up. It’s very simple and straightforward. Compared to the standard Photoshop upsizing, which adds miscellaneous data, the quality is good. These images are all soft and grainy to begin with, so I can’t really tell the effect of enlargement on sharpness. But they look good and it works for me.’

When asked to offer advice to photographers on the way up, Guariglia says, ‘Just go out and shoot as much as you can. Photograph, photograph, photograph! Digital or film, it doesn’t matter. What matters is your passion as a photographer. Decide who you are and what you’re trying to say. Then look at the pictures to see if they capture your passion.’

A multi-talented photographer and writer, Rick Sammon shares Justin Guariglia’s fascination with other cultures and peoples but not his qualms about digital imaging. In fact, Sammon has delved so deeply into the digital domain that he is now an authority on the subject.

Sammon is a member of the prestigious Explorers Club and has documented cultures in Brazil, Nepal, India, Cuba, Thailand, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica. ‘I travel to take pictures and I take pictures to travel,’ he says. In between, he has found time to write hundreds of articles about photography and 22 books on everything from shooting butterfly wings and coral reefs to scaly and slimy creatures in 3D (complete with viewing glasses).

His books on digital photography include Rick Sammon's Complete Guide to Digital Photography: 107 Lessons on Taking, Making, Editing, Storing, Printing, and Sharing Better Digital Images. He also hosts a cable/satellite TV show on film and digital photography, and has taught seminars around the world, including digital photography workshops for Popular Photography and Imaging magazine.

For all his familiarity with things digital, Sammon’s take on Genuine Fractals echoes that of our first two contributors: great program, easy to use, end of story. ‘I don’t care how it works,’ he says. ‘I just need to know that it works and that it’s the fastest, easiest way to do the job. From a practical standpoint, if you want to get a larger print from smaller file—say a three or four megabyte camera—you can get to almost the same place by using Photoshop. The Photoshop technique is called the ‘step process increase.’ What you do is enlarge the image 10% each time until you reach the size you want. The results are good but it takes a lot of time. And Genuine Fractals samples more of the image area, so you really don’t lose any color information at all.’

Genuine Fractals will create enlargements up to 800% the size of the original, all in one step. If you tried that with Photoshop’s 10% increments, you’d have to repeat the process 80 times, which might get a trifle old. Sammon points out that GF also offers batch processing, a technique that allows you to scale numerous images with one set of commands. The commands, by the way, consist simply of putting the desired width, height and resolution into the appropriate fields in the GF pop-up window.

In addition to enlarging the entire image, Genuine Fractals also allows you to crop and blow-up a specific detail. If, for instance, you want a tight shot of a tiger’s eye without coming into contact with his claws, Genuine Fractals can solve your problem. ‘Not everybody in the world can afford a $7000, 400mm, f2.8 lens,’ Sammon says. ‘So if you can’t get as close to the subject as you want, the ability to crop and still make a large print is great. It can be very useful in photographing wildlife when you don’t want to stress an animal by getting too close.’

Sammon adds that you can increase the size of your digital file as easily as the size of your prints. So if cropping has reduced your file to 8 megs, for example, you can scale back up to a 40-meg file without compromising quality. This ability can be very useful to professionals providing stock to agencies that insist on large files.

Now shooting exclusively with digital cameras, Sammon considers enhancement an essential part of the process. ‘I tell people that every picture I’ve ever taken or will take can be enhanced in Photoshop. And will be. I basically use Photoshop to get my pictures back to the way the scene looked when I shot it. Our eyes have an 11-stop exposure latitude. They can see into highlights and shadows over that range without anything getting blown out. Print film sees only seven stops. And slide film sees just three. In Photoshop, I can actually get beyond 11 stops by playing with levels, curves, shadows and highlights. Every picture is different but there are a lot of different things you can do. It’s amazing.’

Vincent Versace was the last of the photographers we talked to about Genuine Fractals but he really should have been the first—not just because he is the most passionate about the program, but also because he was the first to advise the Altamira Group, which developed the program, to target their marketing efforts at digital photographers.

Mark Jaress, one of the principals in Altamira, got the idea for Genuine Fractals in the early 90’s. He was working with fractals to create huge graphics and fractal-based video for a project that involved transferring military technology to the commercial world. It took 20 minutes to render a 40-meg file in those days, so he experimented with fractals to compress files and enlarge images. At the same time, he was hanging out with Kai Krause who was inventing Kai’s Power Tools, one of the first Photoshop plug-ins.

‘It dawned on me that our analog fractal format would also work as a Photoshop plug-in,’ says Jaress. ‘We formed Altamira to market GF (and other products). Initially, we targeted graphic designers and were meeting with okay success. But then Vincent came along and said, ‘Look, the digital photography market is burgeoning, and this is perfect.’ He was very well-connected in that world, so we refocused toward digital photography, and Genuine Fractals took off from there.’ (see our interview with Mark Jaress for more)

Versace is a fine-art photographer who has been shooting digital exclusively since the late-90’s. ‘I bought my first digital camera from Fred Flintstone,’ he quips. When it comes to his stature in the world of digital photography, ‘well-connected’ is a massive understatement. Versace is a recipient of the Computerworld Smithsonian Award in Media Arts & Entertainment and a two-time nominee to the Photoshop Hall of Fame. He the host of the Epson Print Academy, a top instructor at the Digital Landscape Workshop Series, a member of Microsoft's Digital Imaging Applications Group, founding member Epson Stylus Pros and Lexar Elite Photographers, and former consultant to the president of Kodak's Digital & Applied Imaging Group. He is also a member of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals "Instructor Dream Team" and teaches regularly at Photoshopworld.

Versace is outspoken about the advantages of digital photography but he shares the opinion of everyone we talked to that good photos start at the point of capture. ‘With Photoshop, impossible is just an opinion. If you can imagine it, you can do it,’ he insists. ‘That’s the beauty of working in a computer. But the trick is to use Photoshop as an emery board, not a jackhammer. You want to do as much as you can in the camera, solve as many problems as you can at point of capture. That’s where the real quality of your image will come from. It’s better to use real pixels than bent pixels.’

The suggestion that there’s not much to say about GF beyond the fact that it’s the best and simplest tool for performing a limited function was enough to launch Versace on an eye-opening exploration of fractals and their importance for digital imaging. ‘It is a tool, and it’s nice that all you have to do is turn it on and off, like a light bulb,’ he says. ‘But behind the light bulb, you’ve got the atomic power plant. And Genuine Fractals is actually an extraordinarily powerful piece of software that embraces an extraordinarily mind-bending concept of how everything works.’

That mind-bending concept is, of course, fractal geometry, a branch of mathematics that began way back in the 18th-century, was refined in the 1920’s, and finally began to flourish in the late 60s when an IBM researcher named Benoit Mandelbrot was able to use mainframe computers to crunch the necessary numbers.

‘Fractals are the way Nature mathematically expresses itself,’ says Versace. ‘They give you a universal construct of natural forms. You, I, the air, the grain of the wood in the table—it’s all fractals. A fractal is the border between order and chaos, and mathematicians define chaos as random order and order as frozen chaos. The beauty of the software is that by converting the edge-detail inherent in any image to fractal algorithms, you get rid of the enormous overhead of using pixels. The only two times you need actual pixels are to see the image on the screen or to print it. But you don’t need pixels to store it or scale it. You just need to have an accurate representation of the data your camera captured.’ Because fractals can compress images into very small files without loss of detail, Versace has stored all his images in fractal archives.

He also uses GF for all his enlargements, and he is ‘into’ big prints. A 24x30-inch print is small for him. The biggest picture he has ever scaled with fractals was a 17x34-foot billboard from a 2.5 megabyte camera. He insists that the super-sized image looked great as long as you stood at the normal billboard-viewing distance. ‘How do you get from a tiny-assed file to a big-assed file? Because the software uses an actual, physical law of nature, it can’t give you the jagged look of bicubic enlargements (the standard Photoshop technique) because that’s not how fractals work. Fractal patterns repeat the way nature does, like the branches of a tree or the leaves of a fern. The interesting thing is that no two fractals are the same, and yet they all share something in common. At the exact same point in every fractal will be the exact same sequence of numbers, which mathematicians refer to as ‘the thumbprint of God.’ Think of fractals as doing acid without having to take the drug.’

For all his enthusiasm about fractals and digital imaging, Versace agrees with all the photographers in this article that ‘content is king’ and those who believe you can fix everything in Photoshop are misguided. He ended our conversation by quoting a famous remark of Ansel Adams: ‘There’s nothing worse than a sharp picture of a fuzzy idea.’

If you’re interested in taking Genuine Fractals for a test drive nothing could be easier. All you need is the internet and a recent version of Photoshop. Just visit the site of onOne Software (http://www.ononesoftware.com/), watch the brief tutorial and download the free demo. I did and was making mind-blowing blow-ups in about five minutes.