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