PhotoZoom Pro’s biggest strength is the most important: quality. By comparison both Perfect Resize and Blow Up seem to be making a bit of a meal of the job in hand as if to justify their existence. This is useful in its own right, for example when batch resizing, but the biggest difference is that the program is both fast (with multi-processor support) and streamlined. Both rivals are designed to run within Photoshop, but PhotoZoom Pro, while beautifully and tightly integrated with Photoshop (including support for layers and HDR images), is essentially a full-blown standalone application. The full details are in my PhotoZoom Pro 4 review, but to my mind the program has two main advantages. However, with larger increases the image inevitably pixelates and blurs, and any compression artifacts become distractingly obvious. Applying multiple smaller enlargements also helps maintain quality if you have the patience. Set the percentage size of your image to, say, 150%, choose the Bicubic Smoother interpolation method, hit OK and then apply some unsharp masking and the result may well be acceptable. It’s first worth pointing out that Photoshop itself lets you scale up your images based on a choice of interpolation methods with its Image Size dialog. So do they deliver, or are they selling snake oil? This difference might seem intrinsic and unavoidable, but there are a number of software applications that promise to bridge the gap and maintain sharpness while letting you resize your images up to a massive 1 million x 1 million pixels. Scale a resolution-independent vector image up to the size of a football pitch and it will stay as pin-sharp and perfect as the original scale a photo and it won’t. Ultimately the fundamental difference between vector and bitmap graphics is that the resolution, and so final quality, of the bitmap image is fixed.
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