I have tested Photozoom 8. The standalone and export function in Photoshop work but the automate PS function (File/Automate/Photozoom8) does not. I have contacted the developer but have not received an answer. Photo zoom 7 works for all functions.
Top program as plugin in PS and stand alone.I use the praam already for many years.
The high price of the upgrades reserve me to do this. Also 'cause I am not a daily user.
Just an observation: Given the large image size and high quality of images taken by today's digital cameras, even those with smart phones, it occurred to me that image enlargement is much less necessary than it used to be. Of course it's great to have a competent app if you need it. Some more recent reviews would be useful, though. The newest here is a year and a half old. Which may make my point.
PhotoZoom Pro is one of the killer apps in my professional software portfolio. Seems to have a high price tag – but for media professionals it's worth every cent. I'm working with PhotoZoom Pro since many years and it was never beaten by another (or cheaper) solution – but always further developed – top !
I tested this app out on 10 different types of images of different resolutions, and was impressed by the speed and results! I thought that bi-cubic interpolation seemed good enough for too many years - the S-Spline Max interpolation blows it away and it just as fast!
I've compared this to virtually all the other extrapolation software (all of which I paid for and own). I've pixel-peeped and made prints, and pixel-peeped them too. (My photography is in museums and collections, so I'm darned particular.) IMHO, PZ is superior to all of them, in some cases significantly, and in others slightly. But in all cases, it wins.
I bought the upgrade this morning.
Awesome SW used for years by myself and pros to enlarge and enhance photos. Never ever had a problem from it. Updates might be slightly $ but when you need it, you need it. Great product.
Patrick
a good update but try the demo before you shell out for the upgrade. The GPU speeds aren't much better for mobile machines or older video cards and can be slower.
My studio has been using Photozoom to work with publication images for a national magazine with excellent results all the time.
For the Reviews section, we often receive low-res images from the client because that's all they have access to. To save time and aggravation, we use Photozoom to "res-up" the images with great results.
I recommend it to anyone working on publication design.
My studio has been using Photozoom to work with publication images for a national magazine with excellent results all the time.
For the Reviews section, we often receive low-res images from the client because that's all they have access to. To save time and aggravation, we use Photozoom to "res-up" the images with great results.
I recommend it to anyone working on publication design.
Can anybody say whether this version or the previous version beats Genuine Fractals Print Pro? We have several copies of GFPP and would like to move to this for batch processing if the quality is equivalent or better.
I still very much like the PZ Pro coz I use it everyday for my work, but I guess I'll stay away from updating it to V3 for a while. It's quite expensive.
For those who like the same effects (not very far from the results of PZ) but a whole lot cheaper (free). Try this:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/31807/imageenlarger
I've tested it and the results look very decent. The price is $0.00
That's my 2 cents.
I still love PZoom tho!
Using the same 5MP JPEG as before, I tried 200% pixel-size enlargement.
The PZP stand-alone app. produced a 9.7MB file, while the GFPP plug-in made a 6.4MB image, both set for best quality.
Side-by-side Preview magnifications show the GFPP image to be more defined.
I've just tried the Genuine Fractals PrintPro 5.0.4 and the PhotoZoom Pro 2.3.2 CS3 plug-ins on a 5MP JPEG (732KB) for 1000% pixel-size enlargement.
PZP took about 38 minutes on a G4-dual 1.33GHz (upgraded) Mac with 1.5GB RAM, both CPUs just over 70% mark. The resulting image was over 216MB with same quality as the original JPEG.
GFPP used full capacity from both CPUs, and never completed it's task; many minutes into the process, CS3 froze.
Damn this is expensive. Alright alright, Genuine Fractals and Alien Skin's BlowUp kost $199 which pretty much equals the 149 EURO they are asking for this one.
BUT, I don't care what others charge. Bottomline for me is... The bottomline. I have to enlarge and sell quite a few images to make this app worth its price.
This is the same situation as audio plug-ins. Very expensive. More expensive than a lot of full audio editing applications.
Okay okay, this app has patented technology whatever. A lot probably goes into research and development - or does it?
And apart from that I don't find its results to be THAT much better than straight Bicubic done with a bit of care in other image editing apps.
Still, if this app was priced more modestly, I'd maybe purchase it. Of course it is a niche app, which makes the price go up, but I'd bet there are users using pirated/cracked copies of these apps, instead of purchasing. Personally I'd like to add this kind of software to my toolbox, if only I could afford it.
Still the best. Just ran some tests on PhotoZoom Pro 2.1.12, Practals 4 & 5, SizeFixer SLR and Photoshop CS2. The results turned out:
#1 PhotoZoom Pro 2.1.12
#2 Photoshop CS2
#3 SizeFixer SLR
#4 Practals 4 & 5
PhotoZoom Pro has passed everyone. I've been using PhotoZoom for 4 years since they used to call themselves 'Spline'. There were not much improvement until they hit the version 2. I'm printing everything with my wide printer everyday. PhotoZoom is the one I use to enlarge 90% of my work.
Great software.
Have already been a user of version 1 for quite a while and this version 2 is a big improvement. This is typically one-purpose software but it does what it promises. Compared several photo enlarging programs for large format & poster production, and personally liked Photo Zoom Pro 2 best. I found even 800-1000% upsize results to be of acceptable quality. Only pity is it takes longer than Photoshop to make huge blow-ups (although the difference is worth it).
I use PhotoZoom for photos, particularly portraits and people oriented. I use Fractals for graphics, such as Illustrator designs, and Architectural photos or any image with a lot of well defined edges.
After reading some reviews here suggesting that the example enlargements on the developer's website were "suspicious," I decided to do a test. I took a screen capture of the "before" image of the sea shells as shown on the developer's example page and ran it through PhotoZoom Pro 1.1.14.
(This can't really be considered a "fair" comparison to the images on the website as they are probably compressed and may not be the actual sizes used originally, but I thought it would give a quick idea of what this software can do.)
The results were very impressive compared to Photoshop's standard Bicubic interpolation.
However, after considerable messing around with PhotoZoom Pro's settings, I was unable to exactly reproduce the developer's results. The tricky part seems to be the light brown shell left of center at the top of the image. The developer's enlargement shows details that are very sharp in this area. I could reproduce nothing close to those results although this was not a thorough test. The other areas of the image I was able to reproduce virtually identically to the sample image easily.
Overall, I was very impressed with the results. They were really much better than Bicubic interpolation.
While I was composing this, a friend with Genuine Fractals did the same enlargement with that program, though he just ran it through with default settings. His results were quite different than mine. His image has less sharpness but also is a great improvement over Bicubic. Having no first hand experience with Genuine Fractals, I have no idea what would happen with changing the settings, but I conclude that PhotoZoom Pro definitely has a place in the repertoire of photo tools. It's good.
Genuine Fractals 4 blows this rubbish into the weeds. for most images, this is only very marginally better than the Bicubic scaling in Photoshop, and sometimes inferior. they are doing a bicubic scale with some sort of subpixel shifting, it looks like. still blocky, lads... try+compare before you buy, *for sure*. also, i agree with the previous poster about the web examples being "unpossible" LOL. normally i wouldn't slag off someone's product, but for the money and stated purpose, this is a full-on *scam*.
This software does a non trivial task very well. You need to start with a good image, otherwise the results will be disappointing. But with good images I have had excellent success with this program.
Highly recommended.
I examined the "before" and implied "after" examples on their website. The shells image in particular shows detail in the magnified version that could only have come from an original with more detail to begin with. There are micro-details in the enlarged version that simply could not have been extracted from the smaller image.
I downloaded the software and the "before" shells image from their Examples page. I tried zooming it with all of the algorithms offered. Not one of the results came even close to the detail that is present in their implied "after" image. Since the page is titled "Examples" with no commentary or claims, you are left to your imagination to decide what the images on this page mean. If you assume they are "original" and "magnified with PhotoZoom" you would be very wrong. Try it yourself. Yes, the results are better than Photoshop, but if you think you can pull detail out of an image that isn't there in the first place, you'll be disappointed.
It could be that they started with a larger original, rezzed it up slightly with PhotoZoom, and then reduced both down, maybe by different factors. But that would pollute the results, and defeat the whole exercise wouldn't it?
Does sometimes slightly better than Photoshop. Compared it using several pictures, resolutions, enlargements etc.
Would not pay this amount of money since the difference is mostly neglectible. Would be prepared to pay $ 25,= for the cases where it does work a bit better than photoshop.
Does not worth $129, close to Photoshop filters, sometimes a bit better, sometimes not. To resize an image and add details there is only one tool: the magic wand... a true magic one. But magic does not exist. Neither this fantastic tool. S-Spline can resize pics and make average images like Photoshop. Point.
