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| Category: | Productivity - Utilities | By: | BenVista |
| Platforms: | Windows | More info: | www.benvista.com/mai... |
Many professionals are familiar with the problem; quality loss caused by digital image magnification. In many cases a great deal of time is spent on achieving only a fairly acceptable enlargement result, however there are familiar side effects including out-of-focus images and serrated edges which is illustrative for the lack of professional magnification software. PhotoZoom Pro 3 is based on S-Spline XL: a renewed and improved version of our patented, » Read more... |  |
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Many professionals are familiar with the problem; quality loss caused by digital image magnification. In many cases a great deal of time is spent on achieving only a fairly acceptable enlargement result, however there are familiar side effects including out-of-focus images and serrated edges which is illustrative for the lack of professional magnification software.
PhotoZoom Pro 3 is based on S-Spline XL: a renewed and improved version of our patented, self-adjusting, many times awarded S-Spline interpolation technology. As we did with S-Spline, our S-Spline XL technology again introduces a revolutionary breakthrough in digital image enlargement. It is able to render sharp and crisp clear image magnifications, perfectly focused, yet without the jagged edges, loss of detail or lack of photorealism that normally come with enlarging images.
Whats new version 3
- New & improved S-Spline interpolation technique: S-Spline Max
- Higher quality image enlargements & higher quality downsizing
- Makes short work of interpolation artifacts, such as halos
- Film Grain functionality for an increased natural look
- Multi-processor support: huge speed increase!
- Now works as a stand-alone application and as an Automation plug-in and Export plug-in for Photoshop
- Increased image support (metadata, ICC profiles, color spaces, layers, 16 bits/channel (including Raw) and 32 bits/channel (HDR) images, etc)
- Can also be applied as a Photoshop Action
- Compatible with the latest versions of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Adobe Photoshop
What's new in version 2
The most important new feature of PhotoZoom Pro 2 is our new revolutionary enlargement technology S-Spline XL. This is a major improvement on our patented and many times awarded S-Spline interpolation method. Compared to the original S-Spline, the new S-Spline XL method allows you to create even better enlargements in terms of sharpness, natural look and feel, photorealism, and lack of artifacts, blurring or jagged edges.
Support for IPTC, EXIF and ICC profiles, making sure your photo's metadata is properly maintained.
The processing speed of the enlargement algorithms has been improved: enlargements are now created up to 40% faster.
Improved selection / cropping functionality, as well as miscellaneous other interface improvements.
PhotoZoom Pro 2 comes as a Universal Application on Mac OS X, allowing it to run natively on both Power PC and Intel based systems.
Besides running as a stand-alone application and plugin for Adobe PhotoShop, PhotoZoom Pro 2 also works in Adobe PhotoShop Elements, Corel Paint Shop Pro and Corel Photo-PAINT.
The Problem: vague / blurred results with enlargements
DTP professionals, Internet hobbyists and digital camera owners are familiar with the problem: enlarging digital low-resolution images leads to loss of quality.
The problem lies in creating new information. For example: take an image 400 pixels high and 300 pixels wide. The total number of pixels in this image is 120,000 (400x300). If this image is enlarged by a factor of 4 - to 1600 x 1200 pixels - 1.8 million pixels must be created. An image that looks satisfactory on-screen must often be enlarged several times to be output to a higher-resolution printer. This means a great deal of time is often spent to obtain an enlarged image with a somewhat reasonable quality.
Today's enlargement techniques, such as those used in all leading graphic packages, are hardly suited for this type of work. The result: blurred images and jagged edges.
The solution: S-Spline
An ideal enlargement retains its sharpness and has no jagged edges. This is precisely where the patented S-Spline shines. S-Spline intelligently analyses the sharpness and evenness of the original image. S-Spline decides which parts of the image must be enlarged, optimally using more or fewer steps as required. The final results include images, photos and text that remain as true-to-life as possible, with sharp contrasts and no jagged edges.
Interpolation
The essential part in resizing images is always interpolation, the process of estimating values between known samples.
An image consists of pixels. For simplicity let's assume a greyscale image, where each pixel is simply one value - usually ranging from 0 to 255, where a higher value means more brightness, 0 being black and 255 being white. When your image is 400 x 300 pixels, and you want to enlarge it to 400%, it becomes 1600 x 1200 pixels. This means that from a mere 120,000 pixels in the original, you go to almost 2 million pixels in the enlargement. Therefore you have to "guess" what all those new pixels are going to be, based only on the 120,000 original values.
The big difference between various interpolation methods is how smart they perform their guessing.
Have a look at this example image. You see the values in the original picture appear in the enlargement at every 4th pixel. The newly introduced pixels, the ones in between, we have to make up ourselves. This can be done in many ways, for example you can repeat each original pixel 4 times in horizontal and vertical direction. This is called "nearest neighbour" (because for every pixel you don't know, you simply take the nearest value you DO know). This is of course a very simple and fast method, but also yields bad results (the typical mosaic effect is very strong here).
You can also gradually change the values from one to another. In the top row of the example image, the three unknown pixels between 10 and 50 would become (from left to right) 20, 30 and 40. Doing the same in vertical direction, you can fill up all the empty places. This is called "bilinear" interpolation.
Other methods - like bicubic and lanczos - look for more known pixels in order to estimate the empty places. In general, any interpolation method always guesses an unknown pixel by taking some sort of average of the surrounding known pixels. How this average is exactly measured, is what makes one interpolation technique differ from another.
The big difference between all "classic" interpolation methods such as bilinear, bicubic, lanczos and b-spline), and an "adaptive" method like S-Spline, is that the classic methods always take their average (of surrounding known pixels) the same way throughout the whole picture. That is, the weights it uses to take the average only depend on the position in the image, and not on the actual pixel values. The adaptive S-Spline however, also looks at the values of the pixels, and let the average weights depend on them.
Key Features
If you want the best looking photos possible, you need this intelligent, innovative tool to help you get the results you're after:
- Enlarge your photos and images with S-Spline XL, the No. 1 image resize technology in the world. Awarded and praised by the professional and consumer press over and over again.
- The S-Spline algorithm already excelled in preserving sharp edges, our new S-Spline XL algorithm also adds preservation and reconstruction of fine, more subtle details. With PhotoZoom Pro 2, you can create revolutionary image magnifications of unparalleled quality.
- Batch conversion allows you to resize whole series at once: easily adjust the setting for a batch and there you go.
- Extensive support for high-end industry image formats (such as 48 & 64 bit images)
- The software comes as both standalone application and Adobe Photoshop compatible export plugin, and works on Windows and Mac OS X, making sure that whatever work environment you prefer, the workflow runs smoothly.
- For quick results there are predefined settings for common types of content and enlargement types
- For a subtle finishing touch, you can control the end results through advanced fine-tuning tools.
- Compare quality to what competing programs do by switching between S-Spline XL and any of the other existing interpolation algorithms that are available in e.g. Adobe Photoshop
- Large preview window with zooming functionality to show you the end resize result in great detail. What you see is what you get.
System requirements
Microsoft Windows
Vista, XP, 2000, 2003, 95, 98, ME, NT4
Pentium-compatible processor
64 MB internal memory
15 MB
free hard disk space
Mac OS X 10.3
(Panther), 10.4 (Tiger), or 10.5 (Leopard)
PowerPC G4/G5
or Intel processor
128 MB internal memory
20
MB free hard disk space
For Photoshop Plugin functionality, Adobe Photoshop 6 or higher (on Windows) or CS2 or CS3 (on Mac) is required. Works also with compatible applications such as Corel Paint Shop Pro and Photo-PAINT.
Available languages
- English
- Arabic
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Chinese (Traditional)
- Czech
- Dansk
- Deutsch
- Español
- Farsi
- Français
- Italiano
- Japanese
- Korean
- Nederlands
- Polski
- Português
- Russian
- Srpski
- Suomi
- Svenska
- Türkiye