Scale up your pictures 10,000-fold

The latest version of a fractal-based Photoshop plug-in can enlarge images up to 10,000 times while keeping them sharp and unpixellated, the developers claim.

The results from Onone Software's Genuine Fractals 5 are said to be superior than those from interpolation or Photoshop's own bicubic smoother.

A full-frame six-megapixel image can be enlarged to a 180 dots-per-inch 10ft by 15ft print, according to the UK distributor DCP Systems, which will have the new version in stock within the next few days.

Most enlargement techniques work by some form of averaging and interpolation of pixel values. Fractal enlargement, which is slower, seeks repeated patterns in decreasing sizes of pixel blocks, relying on the similarities that recur at different scales in nature.

Fractal patterns can be scaled to any size without loss of detail, though the image quality will depend on that of the fractal analysis. Early fractal compression, which uses the same process in reverse, failed to live up to its hype though techniques have improved and are still used.

You will be able to judge for yourself how well Genuine Fractals 5 works, because a 10-use trial version will be downloadable from the DCP site shortly.

New features include an improved user interface, Photoshop CS3 compatibility (including the Apple Universal Binary version), a new scaling algorithm, and multi-processor support.

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