Make your pictures big and bold.

Enlarging images in Photoshop is part art, part science. The art part is a combination of skill and good fortune. The science part is more predictable: The fewer pixels an image has, the worse it will look the more you enlarge it. When you need to take a small, low-resolution image—usually from the Web—and enlarge it for print publication, you usually get a cruddy-looking, obviously pixelated picture. Blow Up, a Photoshop plug-in that specializes in picture enlargements, does a much better job than Photoshop alone when it comes to enlarging low-res images.

We enlarged photos, website icons, and digital illustrations using Photoshop and Blow Up. We couldn’t tell the difference between the Photoshop and Blow Up images that were two and three times bigger than the originals. But after 3x enlargement, we started to notice that the Blow Up images had crisper edges and smoother colors. Of course, when we took enlargements up to 1,000 percent and higher, both the Photoshop and Blow Up images became unusable for high-quality printing. Still, the Blow Up image was decisively better-looking. One quirk we discovered involved images with patterns made up of lots of tiny items, such as the gravel road in our screenshot. Blow Up rendered the road in a severe, unnatural gridlike pattern.

You access Blow Up via Photoshop’s Automate menu (File > Automate), and it lets you preview your results and adjust the image’s sharpness as necessary. Enlarged images can take on an odd, overly smooth look—almost plasticky—so Blow Up has an Add Grain option that keeps the image looking true to life.

The bottom line. If you need to enlarge many small, low-resolution graphics and can’t access the originals, Blow Up is worth the price.

COMPANY: Alien Skin Software
CONTACT: www.alienskin.com
PRICE: $199
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, Adobe Photoshop CS or later or Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 or later
Easy to use. Good image quality with extremely large images.
Expensive. Slower than enlarging in Photoshop.