Alien skin software blow up 2 review

Figure 1. This broad support gives it an advantage over the competition. Figure 2. The Blow Up interface. Click on the image for a larger version. The interface displays the current image size in pixels, then the document size. When I produce images for print and know my final output size and desired resolution, I prefer to make the change here and can use inches or point measurements.

Just as in Photoshop, Blow Up shows the new image size in megapixels as you make adjustments. Blow Up has no problems with files that size, but just make sure you have enough storage and scratch disk space. The rule of thumb is three to four times the images size in available scratch space.

Check the Duplicate Image Before Resizing box if you want to maintain the original image as it was before the upsampling. The Sharpen Amount slider lets you dial in edge sharpening by percentages.

The Add Grain slider comes in handy when your enlargement is more than percent. At these percentages, upsampling algorithms often make your image appear plastic. The Add Grain slider creates more realistic, plausible images. Figure 3. You can see the difference this makes in patterned areas Figure 4. Figure 4. Both of these images were resized from 72dpi to dpi.

The top image was done in Blow Up, while the bottom image uses Bicubic interpolation in Photoshop. I think the Photoshop artifacts actually make some areas, such as the hair, more pleasing, but you choose. Figure 5. You can see that the solid color and defined lines of the image fare well with Blow Up but start to show jagged stair-stepping with Photoshop.

The resized image can be printed at Pay close attention to the edges in this crop. In this image, I took the original Canon 7D file, which has a resolution of x and increased it to an extreme 30, x 20,, or roughly megapixels. The original file is large enough to print a Those print sizes are quite large and will generally be viewed from several feet away. However, even at several feet, there is still a noticeable difference between the Blow Up 2 version and the Photoshop bicubic resized version.

Go ahead, get up and move across the room from your monitor with the second sample image crop on your screen. As a result, Blow Up 2 eliminates the ugly stair stepping blocks along edges and gives you a smoother line.

The presets also include paper choices and Blow Up 2 performs appropriate sharpening levels automatically based on your paper choices. The Blow Up dialog window offers a surprising amount of control and features. A Settings tab offers more than presets for common output sizes and paper types, making cropping and resizing a one-click affair.

For more precise results, you can use the Controls tab. Along with standard sizing, resolution, and cropping tools, Blow Up features an Auto-Crop option—so if you have a horizontal image and want to resize it for vertical output, Blow Up will intelligently crop the image. In my tests, it worked quite well in most cases. Once you decide on the desired output size, resolution, and cropping of your image, you can move on to using a few image adjustments to assist in creating the best possible appearance of your enlarged image.

With simple sliders or number input boxes, you can adjust a few aspects of the image you see in the preview panel to the right of the controls, which is updated on-the-fly. So what were the results of my tests?