Monday, August 10, 2009

Enlarging photos

Here's a tool I've been waiting a long time for. If you work with images you will have doubtless seen situations where you would have liked to use a larger size image than what you had but could not do so because the image quality would degrade too much on enlargement (e.g. pixellization/artifacts/loss of detail). SmillaEnlarger is a free, open source program that enlarges/magnifies images while keeping up the quality. This standalone software uses a number of filters that are designed to remove some of the typical artifacts generated by the enlarging process and “fill in” image information to achieve a much higher quality image than image enlargement algorithms typically employed in most applications. Photoshop and Irfanview - along with just about every imaging program - enlarges images, of course, and of those two I prefer Irfanview's results by a small margin. But one of the drawbacks with both is they are not interactive, and you can't adjust the results, which is a big plus with SmillaEnlarger.

No comments: