Review: Blow Up 2 Software
November 08, 2008 10:05 AM Filed in: Reviews
Blow Up 2 from Alien Skin
This week I’m going do a review of Blow Up 2 software from Alien Skin.
Now you might say to yourself, how cool is that, there’s software that you can just blow everything up and it will look perfect. Well, that’s really not the case. It’s really better to shoot high quality photographs.
It’s when you need to crop and enlarge you can start having problems. When you starting blowing photographs up by just increasing image size or DPI in Photoshop, Elements or your favorite image editing program you can start have a drop off in quality.
Blow Up 2 is an automation plug-in for Adobe Photoshop Elements and Photoshop which is used to make enlargement which have the best possible detail and sharpness with smooth edges
You might ask when would you need this? A very good question.
It’s for those of us who don’t shoot photographs for bil
(Top) Photoshop Only and (Bottom) Blow Up 2
Alien Skin says, “Their software uses an innovation algorithm that temporarily converts pixels to a vector representation which results in perfectly, smooth, crisp edges. Simulated texture and film grain keep photos looks natural even in extreme enlargements.”
Basically they’re saying, I got this low quality image off the internet or a 72 DPI source and want to get smooth edges and sharpness when I want to blow it up to make a print which will be at 200 to 300 DPI.
You can blow up images just with Photoshop by changing just the DPI, but this leaves you some jagged and blurry images.
The images I tried it on did look better enlarged with Blow Up 2, than with the normal Photoshop settings. The more you blow it up the more you can see the difference.
The software makes it easy using presets for 4x6, 5x7, 13x19, 8x10 and 11x14 along with a few others. The other settings include: 300 DPI inkjet glossy, luster, and matte. They also include presets for video and large paper sizes from 16x20 to 40x60.
In the custom controls mode you can set the width, height and resolution. Others setting included with sliders are sharpen edges, add grain, preserve natural texture, and remove compression artifacts.
The biggest negative of Blow Up 2 is the $249 price. I have no idea why it is so expensive.
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