Fake karst seascapes

[Ken Rennie]

While cropping an image or more accurately stretching vertically when I thought I was cropping I discovered that extreme stretching of this area produced Tolkien like images. Ken
Original

An earlier image given a partial vertical stretch.

Making it look almost real

 

[AlanLichty]

Very cool result - I like your processing accident. It's almost hard to believe this came out of the original at the top.

 

[DES]

I had to look several times to realize just what you had done. I probably shouldn't say your vertically "stretched" images are better......but, for me, they are much more interesting. I call this artistic license. Very nice.

 

[JimFox]

Love it Ken! What a neat process.

 

[Alex Vasile]

Oh these results are really cool!

 

[Ken Rennie]

THanks for the comments Alan, DES, Jim and Alex. A lucky accident. It doesn't really show at these sizes but stretching pixels 5 or 6 fold produces very odd artifacts and they wouldn't print with a quality that I would accept. I have tried various AI sharpening tools and mutltiple ways of stretching or squashing the images so far without any quality gains. I have still to try gigapixel 6 fold upscale and squash but I have never found gigapixel or photo AI to be very good at upscaling no matter what their adverts claim. Ken

 

[Alex Vasile]

THanks for the comments Alan, DES, Jim and Alex. A lucky accident. It doesn't really show at these sizes but stretching pixels 5 or 6 fold produces very odd artifacts and they wouldn't print with a quality that I would accept. I have tried various AI sharpening tools and mutltiple ways of stretching or squashing the images so far without any quality gains. I have still to try gigapixel 6 fold upscale and squash but I have never found gigapixel or photo AI to be very good at upscaling no matter what their adverts claim. Ken

What kind of artifacts are you seeing?

 

[DavidWright2010]

I like it!

But, as you said, artifacts from stretching are hard to get rid of (I tried).

David

 

[Mike Lewis]

Wow, that really is amazing - and your description of the result is spot-on! That looks like quite the happy accident!

ML