By David Gewirtz
Some articles are hard to write and some are easier. Sometimes I manage to include veiled polical references. Other times, I get away with including obscure and not-so-obscure references to the various science fiction universes. And sometimes, I have the fun of discussing items of a strange-but-true nature.
This article is one such article. I get to talk about bearded frogs.
Well, technically, I get to talk about one bearded frog, a company called Bearded Frog, located in England. You can tell it's located in England because the manual begins with, "Right, on to the fun bit."
"I get to talk about bearded frogs. Right, on to the fun bit."
Aside from the company's name (which has given me no small amount of joy while writing this article), the bit of fun we're going to talk about is Bearded Frog's Enlarger PRO. We're looking at version 3.0.2.
Enlarger PRO is designed to help you enlarge your digital images and still retain some degree of sharpness. This is not a simple problem and the software necessary requires some very complex algorithms.
The challenge is that when you enlarge a digital image, you need to create pixels where there were none. For example, I enlarged the 768x508 image in Figure A.
FIGURE A
Courtesy of our clip art collection, we have a sample needing enlargement. (click for larger image)
When I enlarged the image to four times its original size, the resultant image was 3,072 pixels across by 2,032 pixels down. Where do the new pixels come from? For every one pixel in the original image, there are now four in the enlarged images. That means three out of four pixels need to be created algorithmically, metaphorically generated out of thin air.
Normally, then, you're not going to want to enlarge a digital image. Because the enlarged images are going to consist mostly of interpolated pixels (pixels generated algorithmically based on the values of the original, surrounding pixels), enlarged digital images generally look like crap.
"Enlarged digital images generally look like crap."
However, sometimes you just need to enlarge an image. Most often, this is because you want to make a nice print out of your digital original and your printer prints at much higher resolution than your screen.
To test out Enlarger PRO, we took our test image and enlarged it to 2x and 4x the original size. Figure B shows how the image looks when enlarged to twice its normal size. You'll likely want to click through the thumbnail to see the full-sized enlargement.
FIGURE B
Here's the 2x version of the image, using Enlarger PRO. (click for larger image)
At 2x, the Enlarger PRO-enlarged image is really pretty nice.
We then decided to see how the program would perform compared to Photoshop's own Image Size function. Image Size is used to reduce and enlarge images, adjust their bit depth, and otherwise tinker with image size.
Figure C shows the results of Photoshop's Image Size command, enlarging the original 400%, and compares it side-by-side with an image enlarged 4x with Enlarger PRO.
FIGURE C
Look at the eyes and the hair. Enlarger PRO does a better job. (click for larger image)
There's no doubt that Enlarger PRO does a better job. However, there's also no doubt that Enlarger PRO does not do a fabulous job. It's good. It's better than Photoshop. But it's not nearly as good as the original or as our eyes would really like to see.
"It's better than Photoshop."
The program itself is incredibly easy to use. As you can see in Figure D, there's a very simple interface. You select your file, select the enlargement factor, and click Process.
FIGURE D
Here's a full-screen version of the program. (click for larger image)
You'll note that we're showing a maximized, full screen image of the program. When we first launched the program, the window was resizeable, and took up about a third of our screen. However, when we later relaunched the program, Enlarger PRO threw a bit of a wobbly and wouldn't show up except in maximized view. When we tried to resize it the window or restore it, the window simply vanished.
One thing that's very nice about the program, in addition to its one-button simplicity, is the addition of a batch processing capability. Just drag and drop the files you want to enlarge into the pane at the upper left side of the screen, hit process, and all your images will be processed at once.
This is a tough program to rate, simply because the problem it tries to solve is so challenging. We did try other pictures and while most worked like our clip art example above, some resulted in truly horrible enlargements. That's not necessarily the fault of the program -- if you don't give it good pixels to begin with, you're not likely to get good pixels back out.
Unfortunately, we can't rate Enlarger PRO as an exceptional or best-in-class product, but it is a solid, working product (except for the weird screen thing described above). Priced at $39US, if you need something that generates enlarged digital images with a nice degree of improvement over Photoshop, you might well want to consider Enlarger PRO.
We give Bearded Frog's Enlarger PRO a hippity-hoppity 3 out of 5.
RATING: 3 STARS