I have an older image that was shot at 800 ISO on a 12MP Nikon D300. There is a fair amount of noise on the raw photo, but when I reduce it in Lightroom, there is too much loss of detail. I want to upscale the image so that I can print 13x19 at 360 dpi on my Epson P600 (if I don't upscale it Epson will, and I like to be in control. I have used "preserve details 2" with great results, but I am not sure how it will work with a noisy image. And I never know how much noise reduction to use. Anyone have any advice?
The Reduce noise filter in Photoshop does a much better job with preserving details than Lightroom's noise reduction.
There is also a Reduce noise option in Preserve details 2.0, but I have never tried it.
A 12 MP image will print at around 220 ppi at 13 x 19, so I suggest that you try printing it without upscaling first.
I'm not familiar with the Epson P600, but my 9880 never does any upscaling, so may be there's a setting in the printer driver for your printer.
If you don't mind sharing the raw file on Dropbox or similar, I could take a look at it, and maybe give you some suggestions for noise reduction and sharpening.
Technically, the Epson driver will scale an image internally and I've proved this to be the case with fine lined test images. At 180ppi, 360ppi and 720 ppi I could not see any scaling artifacts. At other resolutions e.g 359 or 361 ppi, I could. This suggested that internally the driver scales to 360/720ppi
However - those results were with test images designed specifically to highlight any scaling. With real world images I can see no practical difference whether I scale in Photoshop or just send the image sized without resampling and let the driver handle it internally.
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