Your Pixels Are Showing

Graphic designers are faced with a number of challenges. One common and irksome task is taking small images and making them bigger. Although it may seem simple just to use free transform command in photoshop, this inevitably summons the evil artifacts like the 12th plague of Egypt. For those of you not in the biz, artifacts are the little color blotches that can be found in enlarged photos and are a sure sign of a rookie designer.

But sometimes this cannot be avoided. Sometimes we are obligated to use certain images or we have limited resources and must pull graphics off the web. What’s a designer to do?

A wise man once told me, “When life hands you crap, make a crap sandwich.”

Genuine Fractals by OnOne Software offers you the tools to turn a crap sandwich into a crap souffle! This software uses some sort of ancient Tolkien elven magic to make enlarging photos a breeze. But here’s the kicker, Genuine Fractals can enlarge an image to 8 times the size without loss of quality!

I’ve had a chance to demo this product and although it is capable of enlarging up to 800 percent, it isn’t perfect. There are a few caveats. Upscaling an image from 72 to 300 dpi already takes up 400+ percent of your enlarging power. Another issue with the software is if your image is already artifacting then by no means will it remove artifacts. Garbage in, garbage out.

Other then those understandable limitations I must say that this software is affective and easy to use. They offer a free demo at  www.ononesoftware.com. Go forth, and multiply.