A friend
of mine used to keep telling me that the second
piece of software she always wanted was Genuine
Fractals. (The first of course, was the perennial
favourite, Adobe Photoshop). She wanted to submit
her photographs to an image library, but only owned
a Nikon D70 camera which has a maximum resolution
of 6mp. The image agency required a minimum of
10mp, presumably to weed out the casual amateur
from the serious photographer. But if she could
just make her pictures a higher resolution, her
images would stand a much better chance of
inclusion. Genuine Fractals was her solution.
When I was given the opportunity to review Genuine Fractals, I wondered if it really was that good. So I decided to test a photograph taken from my friend’s 6mp Nikon D70.
I planned to resize this 6mp image to 10mp and I have to admit that I was quite sceptical as I wondered how the missing pixels could possible be filled in. Would the image look boxy or fuzzy? Would it lose detail? How can you make something from nothing?
The clever eggheads at onOne software explain: Genuine Fractals starts by analyzing ever-decreasing sizes of pixel blocks in your image looking for repeating natural patterns at different sizes. These are known as fractals. Fractals are common, naturally repeating patterns found everywhere. For example, a river system viewed from space has the same shape as the veins in a leaf. These are both fractal patterns at very different scales. The great thing about fractal patterns is once you find them they can be scaled to any size without loss in detail. This allows Genuine Fractals 5 to resize your image over 1,000% without losing sharpness and edge detail.
So there you go – sounds simple, but the mathematics behind this must be incredibly complex.
I loaded the program in Photoshop Elements 6, although I could just have easily used my regular Adobe Photoshop, and pulled up the Genuine Fractals interface. While this program will do a number of things including texture control, sharpening and film grain mimicking, its main purpose in life is to resize images. It is one of the easiest to use programs that I have ever used.
You simple decide the new resolution, apply it, and a few seconds later, you have your image bank ready photograph. It is really that simple and reasonably fast. I used a Pentium Dual Core 2.80GHz machine with 2.5Gb RAM and the whole process took 20 seconds, which sounds a long time, but actually for files this size, isn’t too bad. For regular production work, however, I would recommend a faster disk if time is a problem. For me this is a non-issue as I would only normally select a small number of files to upsize.
So, after processing, I examined the photograph for lost detail and pixellation, and was incredibly impressed. There was hardly any visible loss of detail, and when I compared it to the original 6mp image at life size, they were indistinguishable. In the photograph was a label with some text and it was just as easy to read as the original. Whoever did the algorithms for this program deserves the Isaac Newton award for mathematics.
I tried some other more experiments and was suitably impressed. This program does what it says it will do and it does it incredibly well. It deserves its excellent recommendation.
So my friend was right. I wonder just how many images bank photographs were taken on 6mp cameras and fractalised. I for one would not be able to tell the difference.
When I was given the opportunity to review Genuine Fractals, I wondered if it really was that good. So I decided to test a photograph taken from my friend’s 6mp Nikon D70.
I planned to resize this 6mp image to 10mp and I have to admit that I was quite sceptical as I wondered how the missing pixels could possible be filled in. Would the image look boxy or fuzzy? Would it lose detail? How can you make something from nothing?
The clever eggheads at onOne software explain: Genuine Fractals starts by analyzing ever-decreasing sizes of pixel blocks in your image looking for repeating natural patterns at different sizes. These are known as fractals. Fractals are common, naturally repeating patterns found everywhere. For example, a river system viewed from space has the same shape as the veins in a leaf. These are both fractal patterns at very different scales. The great thing about fractal patterns is once you find them they can be scaled to any size without loss in detail. This allows Genuine Fractals 5 to resize your image over 1,000% without losing sharpness and edge detail.
So there you go – sounds simple, but the mathematics behind this must be incredibly complex.
I loaded the program in Photoshop Elements 6, although I could just have easily used my regular Adobe Photoshop, and pulled up the Genuine Fractals interface. While this program will do a number of things including texture control, sharpening and film grain mimicking, its main purpose in life is to resize images. It is one of the easiest to use programs that I have ever used.
You simple decide the new resolution, apply it, and a few seconds later, you have your image bank ready photograph. It is really that simple and reasonably fast. I used a Pentium Dual Core 2.80GHz machine with 2.5Gb RAM and the whole process took 20 seconds, which sounds a long time, but actually for files this size, isn’t too bad. For regular production work, however, I would recommend a faster disk if time is a problem. For me this is a non-issue as I would only normally select a small number of files to upsize.
So, after processing, I examined the photograph for lost detail and pixellation, and was incredibly impressed. There was hardly any visible loss of detail, and when I compared it to the original 6mp image at life size, they were indistinguishable. In the photograph was a label with some text and it was just as easy to read as the original. Whoever did the algorithms for this program deserves the Isaac Newton award for mathematics.
I tried some other more experiments and was suitably impressed. This program does what it says it will do and it does it incredibly well. It deserves its excellent recommendation.
So my friend was right. I wonder just how many images bank photographs were taken on 6mp cameras and fractalised. I for one would not be able to tell the difference.
OnOne Software Genuine Fractals 5.0