Resize Digital Photos up to 2,000% and More with AKVIS Magnifier

If you’ve ever tried to enlarge a digital photograph by more than just 5-10%, then you’re probably quite familiar with just how miserable the results can be. Even the sophisticated resizing algorithms found in major photo editing applications such as Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop can leave the enlarged image blurry and full of artifacts.

AKVIS Magnifier is an application that focuses on one particular type of photo editing: image enlargement. The software uses special spline algorithms that enable it to resize a digital photograph to up to 2,000% or more of its original size with minimal loss of quality. Magnifier can either operate as a standalone application or as a plugin for Photoshop or Photoshop Elements.

How well does it work? Before getting down to specifics of the software, let’s take a look at a quick example of a digital photograph that was enlarged using Magnifier. The original photograph we’ll be using is shown below. (Click any image for a larger view.)

In testing the software, I concentrated on the portion of the image shown below because of the variety of detail involved.

I then enlarged the photo 500% in Magnifier. Here are two sets of close-ups of areas of the enlarged photo before and after Magnifier algorithms were applied. Note that only the default settings (no tweaking yet) of Magnifier were used in this example.

First, we have the area around the lettering.

Next, we have the area around the outer edges of the tire.

The results here are pretty decent considering they were achieved with just one click of the mouse.

Everything went as expected with the download and installation of Magnifier. Users should have no problem here as long as their system meets the recommended specifications listed below. The software does theoretically run on the minimums, but it does not run well, in my opinion. The types of algorithms used in Magnifier are very resource intensive, especially if you’re working with large image files.

For Windows Systems:

• Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista
• Pentium III Processor (Core Duo recommended)
• 512 MB RAM (2 GB RAM recommended)
• 8 GB HDD (10 GB HDD recommended)
• Screen resolution of 1024 x 768 (1280 x 1024 recommended)
• Video Card: Direct X8 compatible, 32MB, 32 bit color depth (64 bit color depth recommended)

For Mac Systems:

• Mac OS X 10.3.9 – 10.5 (10.5 recommended)
• 512 MB RAM (2 GB RAM recommended)
• 8 GB HDD (10 GB HDD recommended)
• Screen resolution of 1024 x 768 (1280 x 1024 recommended)

The only reason I’m rating this segment a 4 instead of a 5 is that I would definitely not want to try to run this application on Vista with only 512 MB of RAM, despite that option being implied as a minimum requirement. (Then again, I wouldn’t want to run anything on Vista with only 512 MB of RAM.)

The user interface of AKVIS Magnifier is very well designed. All the necessary tools of the application are presented out in the open so you don’t have to look around trying to find what you need. At the same time, there’s no sense of clutter or invasion of work area.

When enlarging an image, the AKVIS default parameters are applied, and many times you won’t need to make any other changes. That is, a lot of the time, the only thing you have to decide is how much you want to enlarge the original photo.

Magnifier sports an extremely nice feature for those times when you do want to make custom parameter adjustments. If you’re unsure of what a particular parameter might do, just hover your mouse pointer over its name or slide bar. Doing so will bring up help information on the tool that not only gives you a general idea of its purpose, but also describes how different settings will change the image.

Next up: Continue to page 2 of this review to find out more about the performance and price to value of AKVIS Magnifier. We'll also talk about a nice little surprise we found when playing around with the application.