For that reason, alone, a demo is great to have. While the settings for sharpening and grain were noticeable in print, at screen resolution they were barely visible, and I did not feel that they gave fair examples of the different programs. It was very hard, as I stated earlier, to create images at screen resolution that showed variations. It adds texture where the image may appear to be a little flat or the image tone not varied enough even though the image looked good at a smaller size. I first wondered why I would ever not sharpen when creating an enlargement, but, then, I found that some enlargements actually looked better when the Sharpen Amount was at 0. The interface contains controls for not only regulating the type of enlargement - percent, inches, cm, mm, points, and picas but, also, controls for adding grain to the image as well as a control for sharpening the image. Now, for a discussion of the interface where Blow Up definately differs from its competition. To make a choice on what is visually pleasing, download the demos and try them out. Unfortunately, the differences were not large enough to be visible on the web. But both Blow Up and Genuine Fractals 4.1 Print Pro offered visually slightly different textures and hues when the images were enlarged. Photoshop offered the least favorable enlargements after 400%. After creating and printing numerous images, my basic conclusion was that the decision was up to the user. I created images and enlarged them using Photoshop's bicubic and bicubic with sharpening, Genuine Fractals 4.1 Print Pro, and, of course, Blow Up. One can also sharpen the image as it enlarges, but I will discuss that later in the review. In Blow Up 400% width and 400% height gives a 1600% area enlargement which is the target except in many circumstances where it can be used to enlarge up to 6 times as well or nearly as well as the 400%. GF and Blow Up enlargements are not referred to in a similar manner. However, this review of Alien Skin's Blow Up is not a comparrison review. The main one is Genuine Fractals 4.1 (GF) and Genuine Fractals 4.1 Print Pro. There are other programs that are its competitors. It, also, supports 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit images and RGB, CMYK, Lab, Grayscale, and Duotone image modes.īlow Up can be recorded and played back as an action in Photoshop and it will make use of multiprocessors, multi-core, and hyper-threading.īlow Up is not alone in the market place. It works with Photoshop CS or later and Elements 3 or later. Alien Skin States that it enlarges without the stairstep, halo, and fringe artifacts of bicubic interpolation. Anything larger than that and the photo's resolution is just too small.Blow Up is a Photoshop-compatible automation plug-in for enlaring images. A photo taken with your smartphone, for example, can be blown up to around 13"x10" (a bit larger using some editing tricks) before the quality starts to diminish. Halftoned Imagesīefore you can take any image and blow it up into a wall-size piece of art, you first need to convert the image into either a vector image or a halftoned image, because it's likely that the image doesn't have a high enough resolution to be enlarged. ![]() But before we continue, it's important to know about a couple of terms. There are several free online tools that can convert images into a format suitable for tiled printing, but my favorite one (and the most popular service by far) is The Rasterbator. From there, you line up the tiles to form a grid, thus creating your huge wall poster. Tiled printing is when you print out a large image over several pieces of paper, with each piece of paper acting as a "tile," hence the name. ![]() Related: How Big of a Photo Can I Print from My Phone or Camera?
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