Product Reviews

Blow Up 2 is Alien Skin's latest foray into the impossible Photoshop dream - the ability to enlarge an image without losing quality or sharpness. Bearing in mind that it's impossible to put data back when it wasn't there to start with, Blow Up 2 makes a valiant attempt at the problem, with several fixes and improvements in this version.

When enlarging images, Blow Up 2 will add a smoothing factor to eliminate the harsh pixellation and jagged edges normally associated with this task. This is fine for graphic elements such as logos and line artwork - indeed, these can be enlarged to a satisfying degree with only minimal rounding-off of corners.

When it comes to photographs, though, the problem is trickier. A smoothed image will always look unnatural. And so the plug-in offers optional sharpening and the ability to add artificial grain, which prevents images from appearing over-smooth and simulates the appearance of added detail. A new control, Preserve Natural Texture, aims to avoid the problem of 'crinkling' caused by enlarging fine detailed textures. As with the other controls, this is a slider that operates in near real time, so you can see the effect precisely as you drag.

Recognising that many images to be resized will be sourced from the Internet, Alien Skin has added a Remove Compression Artifacts

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slider that helps to eliminate the blockiness caused by over-enthusiastic Jpeg compression. This, too, produces a softening effect, so has to be used with some caution.

There's also a new Output Sharpening control that's designed to enhance images for specific purposes, including web use, inkjet printing on different paper types and so on. It's worth noting that there's no preset for any sort of high end repro here.

A new Settings pane enables you to store favourite combinations of size and effects, with a range of presets customised for both size and output sharpening. These presets are all in inches, however, and the paper sizes are American rather than European. One annoying factor is that changing between presets automatically sizes the image to fit the screen, even if it was previously zoomed in to Actual Pixel size. Since it's always the Actual Pixel view that we need to check when applying different sharpening methods, it's irritating to have to zoom and pan each time.

Blow Up 2 can now crop images during the enlarging process, streamlining the processing of multiple images intended for set destinations. The new batch processing allows the same set of parameters to be performed on a folder full of images.

The ability to handle a wide range of colour spaces is impressive - not just RGB and CMYK but Lab, Greyscale and Duotone, in 8-bit, 16-bit and even 32-bit (HDR) depths. It's a lot faster than its predecessor and has been built to make use of multi-processor systems.

So is Blow Up 2 that much better than straightforward enlargement in Photoshop? Yes, significantly so. As a one-step solution, the results are crisper, more lifelike, and more finely detailed - within limits, of course. You can't expect enlargements of more than about 300% to look that convincing. Blow Up 2 is certainly a valuable, worthwhile tool, as long as you realise it can't do the impossible.