Thomas Ruff Effect

[Serge J-F. Levy]

I am interested in how Thomas Ruff obtained this effect on his photographs:

http://www.icp.org/atf/cf/%7BA0B4EE7B-5A90-46AB-AF37-7115A2D48F94%7D/INFINITY2006_ruff_IMAGE.JPG

From what I can gather, he is taking images from the web and then processing them somehow and making very large prints.

I have been able to get large squares on my images through low jpeg compression however when I go to print out, the squares lose their definition and edges. I have seen Ruff's prints and noted that these square, and the pixels inside of them, are sharply defined.

I plan on making a 16x20 digital c-print as my final piece.

Can anyone suggest how I might go about gaining the same effect? Is it second party software?

Thanks,
Serge

[harrykauf]

resize to your print resolution without interpolation.
"nearest neighbor" in photoshop.

[davidb]

Photograph your TV

[Serge J-F. Levy]

Harry-

Thanks for your time. If you could elaborate upon your response, I would appreciate it greatly. I should take my file which is currently roughly 5"x7" at 72dpi and do what?

Many thanks,
Serge

[Frank Petronio]

There is a "crystalize" filter in Photoshop, you can set the size of the blocks. Not seeing details, he probably interpolated up the resolution and added banding and noise as well.

[harrykauf]

serge: lets say you want to print your image 5"x7" @300dpi.
At the moment it has only 72dpi so if you send it to the printer or
scale it to @300dpi in photoshop you add new pixels. By default
photoshop uses bicubic interpolation when you increase the image size
which softens the transition between pixels.
What you need to do is switch from Bicubic to Nearest Neighbor when
changing the image size to your final print resolution.
You find it in Image-> Image Size and there on the bottom next to "resample".
So try scaling to 16x20@300dpi and see if that is the result you are after.

[Daniel_Buck]

looks like heavy flash video compression to me

[Serge J-F. Levy]

Daniel-

Some one else mentioned that it may be video compression however the images are titled "jpeg" and are purported to be lifted off the internet. If it were video compression, how would this be applied to a jpeg?

Best,
Serge

[Daniel_Buck]

Daniel-

Some one else mentioned that it may be video compression however the images are titled "jpeg" and are purported to be lifted off the internet. If it were video compression, how would this be applied to a jpeg?

Best,
Serge

You could screen capture the video, or some video programs may be able to open a video and export single frames from the video. I doubt that most video compressors would be able to handle a large image for print, so more than likely if you don't want to try and replicate the effect in photoshop, you would have to video compress a smaller still, then blow it up after it's compressed.

My guess is that you could recreate this effect in photoshop. It's more than a straigh pixel blowup, it has subtle gradients in the pixels, so you may end up tinkering a round for a bit till you get it. But once you figure out something that you like, you can record an action of it, and play it back on any image you want.