Joanne Handley - Testing Genuine Fractals

IDEAS, .PROCESS. AND CHALLENGES
My initial intention was to print EELe on canvas at about 49 inches square. This meant taking a Photoshop file of 4.5MB and making it 236MB, which is a task the computer can easily manage but not without sacrificing the quality of the original image. Using Genuine Fractals stn extension seemed to alleviate much of this concern. I abandoned the idea of the canvas print after receiving disappointing proofs back from a local printing company, which left me with little choice but to print the entire image in pieces using my desktop printer. This meant hours of testing ink and paper combinations on both the Epson 740 and 820 until I obtained the result I was happy with. . . . . in the end the unintended path unveiled the more interesting process and artwork.

CREATING .THE .DIGITAL. IMAGE
EELe originated from a scan of my painting Alchemist (left). With the aid of Photoshop, I used the computer to recode the scan via a series of progressions which reconstruct the image. In one sense the final image is one and the same as the original scan, however, the image data has been recorded and then printed at a different interval in the progression.

		When Curator Bruce Brown selected the digital image EELe for the "Plugged In" exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, it provided me the perfect opportunity to test Altamira's Genuine Fractals claim to res up images for large format printing without compromising image quality. Genuine Fractals is an Adobe Photoshop compatible plug-in that allows images to be transformed into "resolution independent assets", eliminating the relationship between pixels and resolution. By mathematically encoding the image as an algorithm, the new file structure (a stn file extension) can be rescaled, maintaining sharpness regardless of image size. The effectiveness of Fractals speaks for itself (see examples below). While edge sharpness is apparent, I did notice the subtleties in continuous tone of the image were perceptibly reduced. While this did not present a problem for my purposes with EELe, it could create concerns for images requiring smooth tonal gradients such as ambient haze or the softness of skintones in a portrait. Hard edges however, discernibly benefit.
Top Left: Testing ink / media combinations using STN and Photoshop PSD formats. Top Right: Dome_Alum © 2002 Digital image stn file format Above and Below: Installation views of EELE © 2002 Digital Image, hand tiled inkjet print 119 x 119 cm Plugged In exhibition, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, USA 2002 Bottom: Alchemist © 1999 oil on canvas 50 x 50 cm.



			click on the image above to view a comparison between a jpeg & stn file upscaled 500 percent