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For Win/OSX/Linux. Price: Free
Last night in the wee small hours I was looking through some “gonna get to it links”, and came across SmillaEnlarger. As the name suggests, it is an image enlargement tool.
I have been looking for a good tool to do this, as many of my images are from my older digital camera which had a lower resolution, so I am unable to get some larger prints because of this. As a result, I have been begging photography buddy Nigel Honey to run them through Genuine Fractals for me.
What makes SmillaEnlarger & Genuine Fractals different from using your favourite photo editing program and choosing resize is that they use special algorithms to enlarge the image while retaining sharpness & detail.
But what piqued my curiosity was Smilla’s price: Free
The sample image above is my Fungal Infection image. The original is 2549 pixels along the long edge. For comparison, I have used Genuine Fractals & Smilla to enlarge these images to 7200 pixels on the long edge – a 293% enlargement. Smilla’s processing settings were set to full sharpening. The resulting images are a 1:1 crop.
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I think looking at the comparison between Genuine Fractals and Smilla, you are hard pressed to see any signficant difference in detail quality. If anything, I think Smilla has handled the noise better. And for the price, Smilla is Big Bang for buck!
So for anyone who has photos they wish to enlarge for print purposes, check out SmillaEnlarger.