COMPANY: Alien Skin | URL: www.alienskin.com | TYPE: Plug-in | PLATFORM: Mac, Windows | PRICE: $199
				Alien Skin Software recently released Blow Up, an all-new plug-in for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements (only). Designed for both photographers and graphic artists, Blow Up offers the highest quality image enlargement available. Blow Up simplifies and improves image enlargement, making it easy to convert web graphics to print and create large format and gallery prints from digital snapshots. Better than Photoshop bicubic and other third-party solutions, Blow Up preserves the crisp lines and smooth colors in a source image. Blow Up scales image up to 10,000%–10 times in each dimension–with no stairstep, halo, or fringe artifacts. In addition to superior image quality, Blow Up offers several distinguishing features. Blow Up supports CMYK, RGB, Lab, Grayscale, and Duotone image modes. Blow Up resizes multi-layered documents (no flattening necessary) and works with 8-, 16- and 32-bit compositions, including RAW and HDR images. Blow-Up can resize an image in a new document, leaving the original untouched. Lastly, taking advantage of multiprocessor, multi-core, and Hyper-threading technology, Blow Up offers greatly improved performance on modern CPUs. Host Requirements: Because Blow Up is an automation plug-in, it works exclusively with Adobe Photoshop CS or later and Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 or later.
		Above: The Blow Up interface showing a detail of the original 4MP image which was magnified from 2272 pixels wide @ 72ppi to an extreme 30,000 pixels wide at 72ppi. Below, the full-frame image showing the magnified area in a red circle. Upper right, the unretouched circled portion of the image at 100%/72ppi.
		Above, a detail of a sign (seen at left in the photo below) before and after treatment with Blow Up.