Software review: Upsizing your picutres

You may find that your “developed” file is not big enough and therefore that you need to upsize it (scale it). There are different tools for that:

Genuine Fractals
onOne Software
www.ononesoftware.com

Recommended by many. Also referred to as Genuine Fractals PrintPro. From a workflow point of view the current version of GF is much better than the older one. However, it does not have any real batch function. (They have an interesting GF/PS comparison on their site, but I would rather trust my own tests than their marketing material…)

Buy it: Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

pxl SmartScale
onOne Software (yes, them again)
www.ononesoftware.com

Also recommended by many people. I found the work flow much better than with Genuine Fractals, but again, it does not have a proper batch function. (And neither of the two onOne products can be made to work in proper batch mode with e.g. Photoshop actions even if you can create actions with them. They still require manual intervention for each image.)
Buy it: Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

Photoshop
Adobe
www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/

Photoshop has built-in functions for scaling (both up and down). When you use it for up-scaling you will supposedly get the best result with “bi-cubic smoother” whereas for down-scaling bi-cubic sharper is supposed to be better. Anyway, for up-scaling many people now say that PS (in recent versions) are as good as, or better, than the stand-alone tools. My small tests of it showed that PS does indeed give just as good results. But the really big advantage is that it works in “real” batch mode. That makes a big difference if you are processing 1000s of images…
Buy it: Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

BlowUp
AlienSkin
www.alienskin.com

This is recently (Nov 2006) launched and I have not tried it. “Better than Photoshop”, “Scale up to 3600% without obvious distortion”,… Perhaps.