Artwork Sources

[Roger McDowell]

Does anyone know of other sources for high quality artwork similar to that available from West Coast Lasertile (http://www.lasertile.com/)?

[Dan Hintz]

I'd find some good quality, free images via Google, then use a good fractal-based image resizer to get up to the resolution I needed.

[Roger McDowell]

Are you talking about searching Google Images? I'm not familiar with "fractal-based image resizers". Does that improve the DPI of JPG and other raster based images?

Thank you!

[Dan Hintz]

If you must use a JPG image as your base, make sure it hasn't been compressed into oblivion. Try for TIFF, if possible, or GIF (though finding large GIFs will be problematic due to the encoding mechanism). Any image can be improved to some degree, depends upon what you start with... a fractal resizer will generally do the best job on "natural" images.

[Lee DeRaud]

There's a pretty decent comparison of different algorithms here: http://www.americaswonderlands.com/digital_photo_interpolation.htm
To my eyeballs, there's little to choose between fractal and s-spline (the algorithm used by Photozoom Pro, bundled in Corel X5).

Two other points:
1. Most of the Lasertile artwork I've seen is not just raw photos blown up to insane sizes: there's a ton of other manipulation done to get the kind of clean monochome bitmap that the tiles render well. Most of it is relatively straightforward, but I suspect it works a lot better to resize-and-massage rather than massage-and-resize, which means it's gonna be slow and probably not a lot of fun.
2. "Free image" is not the same as "public-domain image". Search this forum for "copyright", I'm really not in the mood to rehash the whole thing here in this thread.

[Dan Hintz]

There's a pretty decent comparison of different algorithms here: http://www.americaswonderlands.com/digital_photo_interpolation.htm
To my eyeballs, there's little to choose between fractal and s-spline (the algorithm used by Photozoom Pro, bundled in Corel X5).
Seeing as how I have no idea what algorithm "Genuine Fractals" (now Perfect Resize) uses, and the fact that the most recent testing was done 7.5 years ago, I'm not sure if it's the best site to be basing your decision on. And "fractal" is a term that covers a wide range of algorithms (as is s-spline), so making a decision upon only one company's implementation of it is probably limiting your options.

"Free image" is not the same as "public-domain image".
I used loose terminology to suggest a scouting location. I'll let someone else decide what they want to do with what they find.

[Lee DeRaud]

Seeing as how I have no idea what algorithm "Genuine Fractals" (now Perfect Resize) uses, and the fact that the most recent testing was done 7.5 years ago, I'm not sure if it's the best site to be basing your decision on. And "fractal" is a term that covers a wide range of algorithms (as is s-spline), so making a decision upon only one company's implementation of it is probably limiting your options.
I don't know what algorithm they're using either, but they're the only actual implemention that comes up when you google "fractal image resizing", unless possibly you wish to roll your own based on somebody's research paper. I was simply pointing out that, absent any evidence to the contrary, the (non-fractal) resizer in Corel X5 is probably just as good.

[Dan Hintz]

My bookmarks are "in storage" or else I would post a bunch of links right here... I know I have at least 5 or 6 products bookmarked (a couple are even free) that use fractal-based algorithms (and funny enough, none of them included Genuine Fractals.