Real People Reviews: Blow Up by Alien Skin

Posted by Daniel East Oct 17, 2006 at 1:26am

When you have a web image, graphic, or photo that you need, for example, to include in a newsletter or flyer, but the 72 dpi resolution only produces a pixelated patchy production piece, there are only so many solutions out there that can solve this issue. What is already built into Adobe Photoshop CS2 is adequate if you want to increase by not more than 30 percent or so and products that might do a decent job may cost up to three times as much money. Longtime developers of advanced consumer plug ins for Photoshop, Alien Skin, have created Blow Up, a cost-effective (US$199), solid performing and up-to-date solution that will fill this need and produce some of the best output I’ve seen to date when attempting this type of task.

In order to launch Blow Up, unlike most other plug-ins, you open it by selecting “automate” and navigating to the pull-down menu for your chosen image. Once your Blow Up interface is launched, you can preview your image at the desired size and control the aspects of such an alteration with simple sliders. Incredibly simple to use as the previews are live, your images not only enlarge to your desired size and resolution, but also seem to be lacking that annoying abundance of visual artifacts and noise often seen from other titles of this type.

Blow Up supports most common file types in nearly every color set from RGB to CMYK and LAB as well as the ability to enlarge your image to 3600 percent and still maintain reasonable quality. The key is that this is a winner at every turn. It is easy to use, effective and produces very good results at a surprisingly low price of only $199.00 USD. To put it another way, Alien Skin succeeds where other similar titles fail – for less than half the price of most of their competitors similar offerings. Blow Up only requires Photoshop CS or CS2 or Elements 3 or later; a PowerPC G4 processor and OS 10.3.9 or later.

As one of the longer standing companies in the world of desktop publishing, graphic design and imaging, Alien Skin has a history of interesting plug ins that offer a few really usable items in a suite of many; however, and I’m very happy to report, their more recent titles show a dramatic improvement in overall performance, usability and quality. This is a very good example of their strides in this market and I believe Alien Skin’s branding will continue to be a part of the creative community beyond their already well known stamina in this evolving realm of digital imaging, photography and design. If you need to increase your web images, older images or just using web-ready files to print your company’s web site – the value, performance and, most important, image quality from Alien Skin’s Blow Up should be your first purchase. In fact, and if you already own another product that performs a similar function, complain to the other vendor once you see how well Blow Up outperforms the rest.

Macsimum rating: 10 out of 10

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