Alien Skin Launches Blow Up 3 Image Enlarging Tool

Software developer Alien Skin has just unveiled the Blow Up 3, a new image enlarging tool with good-looking interface and Lightroom integration. Comes with more advances than the previous version, the Blow Up 2, this software enables image enlarging (e.g. portraits) to up to 300 % in each dimension.

Blow Up 3 promises clearer, sharper enlarged images than most software like Photoshop. A side-by-side comparison—the picture on the left is enlarged using Blow Up 3, while the picture on the right is processed using bicubic algorithm—shows that the enlarged image result appears smooth and sharp.

“As you can see, the traditional bicubic technique on the right looks blurry and has stairstep artifacts.  Bicubic is the resizing algorithm used by Photoshop and most image editors.  On the left is the same image enlarged with Blow Up 3.  Notice that eyelashes are still thin, smooth, and sharp,” claims Alien Skin. “Our best achievement in Blow Up 3 is image sharpness,” added Terence Tay, the designer of Blow Up. “Even huge prints don’t have any traditional computery artifacts.”

Blow Up 3 will be available starting from November for US$199. The plug-in can be applied using Adobe Photoshop CS4 or later, Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 or newer, or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 or later. photographybay.com