COMPANY: Alien Skin | URL: www.alienskin.com | TYPE: Plug-in | PLATFORM: Mac, Windows | PRICE: $249
					Blow Up 2 is a Photoshop plug-in that produces enlargements dramatically sharper than any other software, especially Photoshop! Image Quality Blow Up uses an innovative algorithm that temporarily converts pixels to a vector representation which results in perfectly smooth, crisp edges. Simulated texture and film grain keep photos looking natural even in extreme enlargements. Blow Up can even clean up JPEG compression artifacts when a client insists on using a low quality source image from the Web. Simplicity and Time Savings Preparing photos for print can be surprisingly tedious, often requiring a pile of sticky notes with calculations involving dpi, aspect ratio, and cropping sizes. New features in Blow Up 2 are designed to take the complication out of this process. Over 100 presets for common output sizes are available that make cropping and resizing easy to do in one step. When you load a preset, Blow Up makes an intelligent guess about where to crop the image using the Auto Crop feature. The Auto Rotate feature adapts the preset to match your photo’s orientation. Blow Up applies the proper amount of output sharpening based on the paper type you choose. Resizing many photos at once is now easy to do in a single step with Blow Up’s built-in batch processing tool. This tool is much easier to use than the multi-step process of creating a Photoshop action and then running it with Photoshop’s batch command. Technology Every bit of the latest technology has been added to Blow Up 2. Blow Up takes advantage of multi-processor and multi-core systems. The more processors/cores, the faster it runs. Even with just a plain old single processor, Blow Up 2 runs faster than Blow Up 1. Blow Up handles the most sophisticated images demanding professionals can throw at it. Nearly every color space is supported, including Grayscale, Duotone, RGB, CMYK, and Lab. Most image resizing software only supports RGB color space and you have to pay an extra $140 to get CMYK support from Blow Up's main competitor. All bit depths are supported, including 16-bits/channel (for Raw images) and 32-bits/channel (for HDR images). Blow Up is the only resizing plug-in that supports 32-bits/channel images. Blow Up can now resize up to the limit of Photoshop’s image dimensions, which is 300,000 pixels. Of course, a square image that big would choke Photoshop, but if you need to make a billboard or a bus wrap and Photoshop can handle the image, now Blow Up can too. Most other image resizing plug-ins can’t make photos larger than about 30,000 pixels on a side. Blow Up works in the Windows 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4. What's new in version 2.0.3 The Blow Up 2 Startup Panel for Photoshop CS4 makes running Blow Up much easier. The startup panel sits in your Photoshop window and can be moved or docked like any other built-in Photoshop panel. You can use it to launch Blow Up or even resize an image with a single click. If you have Photoshop CS4 or later you will be given the option of installing the panel when you install Blow Up. Once installed, you can start the panel from the Window->Extensions menu. The free Gallery Wrap Panel for Photoshop CS4 complements Blow Up 2. You may have enlarged your image to make a massive gallery wrap print. You can then use the Gallery Wrap Panel to add a border to your image so you don’t lose any of the image when it is wrapped around the frame. Run Blow Up from the Filter Menu Blow Up 2.0.0 appeared in the File->Automation menu rather than the Filter menu, which confused some users. Version 2.0.3 now lets you launch Blow Up 2 from the Filter menu. Performance Slider A slider is now available in Blow Up’s preferences panel that controls whether Blow Up 2.0.3 optimizes its processing for speed or memory use. It is rare for Blow Up to run out of memory, but if it does then this slider can solve the problem. If memory is not an issue then this slider can give Blow Up a slight speed increase. You can bring up the preferences panel by starting Blow Up and then typing Command-K on Mac or Control-K on Windows. You can also find it under the Edit menu. European Paper Sizes Blow Up 2.0.3 now includes ISO paper sizes commonly used in most of the world, such as A4. Many of these output sizes are available through a single click in the Startup Panel mentioned above.
	Above: The Blow Up interface showing a detail of the original 6MP image which was magnified from 2816 pixels wide @ 72ppi to an extreme 17,046 pixels wide at 300ppi (17 megs to 623.4 megs).