By David Gewirtz
Back in July, we ran a review of Enlarger PRO, a program by Bearded Frog (a name still makes me chuckle) that uses fractals to help you enlarge your digital images and still retain some degree of sharpness. Although the product had some user interface quirks, we liked it, and gave it three bearded frogs out of five, noting that the program did do enlargements better than Photoshop.
After the review ran, we got a number of reader letters asking us about a program called Genuine Fractals, perhaps the best known of the enlargement add-ons for Photoshop. This is that review.
Genuine Fractals was originally from a company called Lizard Tech (yep, bearded frogs and lizards -- you can't make this stuff up!), but has since been acquired by onOne Software.
To keep things consistent, we're going to use the same 768x508 test image we used back then, shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
Courtesy of our clip art collection, we're reusing this test image. (click for larger image)
In our earlier Enlarger PRO test, we scaled the image up 200% and 400%. To be fair, Genuine Fractals explicitly claims "Genuine Fractal's scaling ability is best within a 500-600% increase range in size or resolution." Later in this article, we'll look at a 600% enlargement, but since we've got the 200% and 400% test images, that's what we're going to compare against first.
Scale-off #1: 200%
In our first heat, we ran Enlarger PRO against Genuine Fractals at 200%, as you can see in Figure B.
FIGURE B
We test Enlarger PRO against Genuine Fractals at 200%. (click for larger image)
Interestingly, it appears the enlargement done by Enlarger PRO is substantially cleaner than that done by Genuine Fractals, a result we frankly didn't expect.
Take a close look at Figure C.
FIGURE C
Enlarger PRO wins at 200%. (click for larger image)
If you look closely at the two necklaces, both have some image corruption. But while Enlarger PRO's image corruption is limited to the area just around the necklace, there's clear discoloration on the young lady's neck area in the Genuine Fractals enlargement.
Likewise, the woman's lips and teeth look quite clean when enlarged using Enlarger PRO, but the same enlargement level shows pixelization in the Genuine Fractals enlargement.
The same problem can be seen around the girl's eyes. On the Enlarger PRO side, you can see she's got smooth coloration, where there's definite pixelization around the eye in the Genuine Fractals enlargement.
At 200%, the win definitely goes to Enlarger PRO. But what about at 400%?
Scale-off #1: 400%
It was much harder to call a winner at 400%. At 400%, Photoshop, Enlarger PRO, and Genuine Fractals all showed some degree of artifacting, as shown in Figure D.
FIGURE D
All three programs left artifacts. (click for larger image)
Again, though, it's impossible to avoid noticing the pixelization in the Genuine Fractals enlargement. Genuine Fractals barely bested Photoshop and clearly didn't match Enlarger PRO in terms of image quality.
At 400%, the win again goes to Enlarger PRO.
Examining Genuine Fractals at 800%
As I mentioned earlier, in the included documentation, Genuine Fractals claims that the program works best at 500-600% enlargement. Although time didn't permit us to do another test against Enlarger PRO, we did generate a 600% enlargement using Genuine Fractals, shown in Figure E.
FIGURE E
The 600% enlargement showed the same artifacting as smaller enlargements. (click for larger image)
Although the overall enlargement wasn't bad, it still showed the same artifacting problems, in the same locations, as the 400% enlargement.
Our verdict: the frog beats the lizard
At the beginning of the article, I mentioned that Enlarger PRO had gotten a 3-star rating in Connected Photographer. It didn't score a 4 because of the user interface problems we encountered and because the enlargements weren't quite as good as we'd really like.
But that was before we looked at Genuine Fractals. Genuine Fractals does have a cleaner user interface. We looked at the base product, which sells for $159.95. There's also a Pro version that does batch processing and has image presets. That version costs $299.95.
"Without question, Enlarger PRO is the better buy."
By contrast, Enlarger PRO costs $39. That's a substantial cost savings over Genuine Fractals, and as our tests show, it beats Genuine Fractals quality by a considerable measure.
Because it's so substantially less expensive and generates a significantly higher quality image than its rival, we'd like to upgrade the rating of the product -- but we can't. Until the user interface quirkiness is removed, Enlarger PRO has to stay at a 3 out of 5 rating.
On the other hand, Genuine Fractals generated the lower quality enlargements and cost four times more than its rival. This is a 3 out of 5 product if we ever saw one.
RATING: 3 STARSWithout question, Enlarger PRO is the better buy. Given how well-known Genuine Fractals is, this was a surprise finish we certainly couldn't predict.