Alien Skin has released another updated product, Blow Up 3, that has only one major downside: price.
Most of the company’s add-ons for Photoshop are aimed at graphics professionals and the $199 price tag makes sense. Blow Up, however, is one that would be valuable to consumers if the price were less expensive.
As the name implies, Blow Up allows users to resize photos, It uses more sophisticated technology that Photoshop’s standard tools, thereby allowing you to make photos larger without losing quality. When you blow up a digital photo, the density of the pixels (the “dots” of image data) in the original image is diffused and the conversion software needs to extrapolate data to ensure that the image quality is maintained.
Not only does Blow Up resize, it will also as part of a one-step process crop and fit to standard web and photo paper sizes. It does so in a very user friendly fashion, making it accessible to non-professionals. In fact, the major advance in version 3 is that the process is now so automated and intuitive, anyone who can use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements will find Blow Up easy to use.
The ability to resize photos is as important to average users as pros. Maybe even more so.
These days consumers routinely take shots from cellphone cameras, which lack the close-up, wide-angle, or telephoto lens of pro cameras. As a practical matter, then, you often wind up with a photo that depicts a much bigger area than you actually want. So you will want to crop down to the piece that is really of interest. However, a significant crop will reduce the pixel density beyond what is required for a quality print. You need to blow the picture back up to ensure that there is enough digital information for your printer.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and all that. I took an early morning photo off my balcony with my iPhone. Shot captured a moody cloud cover handing over the skyline of Boston in the background. Picture was way too big to upload to this blog, so in this case is needed to be blown down, which Blow up accomplished in roughly three mouse clicks:
It’s not immediately apparent that the Boston skyline is there -- it’s just a row of shapes along the horizon. So I did a crop with Blow Up that put the landmark Prudential Center at center-left and the John Hancock Building further to the left:
The end result was the equivalent of a telephoto lens shot taken without the telephoto.
Simple. Useful. Works with Photoshop Elements as well as the full version of Photoshop. I cannot give it a 100% endorsement because of the price. However, if it does fit into your budget, Blow Up 3 will greatly enhance your ability to tweak everyday cellphone and point-and-shoot photos into more sophisticated shots.
