Genuine Fractal

So, you shot pictures copiously with your iPhone 3G. After shooting 20-50 so-so shots, you get one of your cat on a Roomba that you have to show everyone; you know it’s going to be a hit and you want to print it.

Here’s the issue: at 2 megapixels, and 300 ppi (pixels per inch–many refer to it as dpi, but really mean ‘ppi’), you can get a 5.8″x3.8″ print–not even a standard 6×4″ print. It’s true that you could reasonably print at 240 ppi and the difference wouldn’t be visible, so you could yield some extra increased paper real estate in both directions, but we’re going to stick with the tried-and-true 300 ppi resolution here for the sake of this discussion.

So, what do you do if you want an 8×10″ print or larger? Are you out of luck? No, not really…thanks to a great Photoshop plug-in called Genuine Fractals from OnOne. I have been using GF since a very early version and have consistently got great results. The product which has passed through the hands of several companies until it found a home with onOne, has been in the market for something like 10 years now and has proven its worth to me over and over.

Note that you will face the same enlargement issues when you shoot with a DSLR or a point & shoot. While you might easily print an 8×11, if you want to go bigger, you might have to use GF to help you with that.

Now it’s true that Photoshop and most other image-editing programs have their own algorithms for interpolating or ‘up-sampling’ images to larger sizes. However, none of them, in my experience, does as good a job as Genuine Fractals does. You can visit their website for more details and a comparison of GF to Photoshop’s own interpolation capabilities. So, while ‘bicubic smoother’ in PS CS4 won’t cause you complete embarrassment, it also won’t do your image as proudly as GF will.

Basically, Genuine Fractals which comes in a Standard ($159.95, for a limited time only $129.95 – please remember to use our Amazon portal to purchase if you decide to buy it) and Professional Edition ($249.95), applies fractal algorithms to your image to which insert extra information and thereby blow-up your image to much larger sizes with no (or very little, depending upon how large you go) visible distortion. The ‘Pro’ version gets you CMYK image blow-up capability plus integration with LightRoom and Aperture. Personally, I think the standard version has everything you need, assuming you use Photoshop.

onOne claims that you can blow up a 2MP to something equivalent to 30″x42″ at 300 ppi. Based on my own results with this amazing plug-in, I can believe it. I have blown up 2-3MP images to at least that size and carefully viewed the image for artifacts and aliasing and have been pretty amazed at the results. I have shown blown-up images of my enlarged photos and artwork to many people and have gotten nothing but compliments (of course, that could be to spare my feelings as well, I guess). But even if you don’t want to go this big, just being able to blow up your 4″x6″ to 12″x18″ without distortion would be pretty welcome, no?

The product’s stability as a plugin within Photoshop is very good and the user interface by and large is also pretty good. I can’t vouch for how well it co-exists with Photoshop Elements or Aperture, though, since I haven’t used it with those programs.

GF 6 is compatible both with Photoshop CS2-Cs4, and Photoshop Elements 5-7, but only the professional version is compatible with Lightroom 2.x and Aperture 2.x.

Chances are, if you shoot on average 1 or more pix with your iPhone a day (as the statistics indicate most iPhone owners do) and many more than that per month with your digicam or D-SLR, than you probably will have at least a couple a year that are important to you to save and to view at larger sizes. If that’s true, then–whether you print images yourself or send them to a printing service electronically–you can benefit from spending $159 on GF. Keep in mind, as implied in the preceding sentence, that you can use GF not just on your iPhone pictures, but on any digital image. You can take a 12MP image and blow it up to 75×115″, again with no apparent loss of quality.

You can download a trial version and try it out before making a purchase decision. Check it out…

[This article was adapted from a post which originally appeared on iPhonePhotoVideo.com. It is published here with their permission]

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