Blow Up 2 is a Photoshop plug-in that produces enlargements sharper than any other software, including Photoshop! 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.

Preparing photos for print can be tedious, often requiring 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 2 makes a 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 even applies the proper amount of output sharpening based on the paper type you choose.

Technology speed-up

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.

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 our 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 first major Photoshop plug-in that will work in the upcoming Windows 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4.

Pricing and Availability

Blow Up 2 sells for $249 USD with an upgrade price of $99 USD for registered users of Blow Up 1. Online or physical delivery is available through the Alien Skin website at www.alienskin.com. A real live human (imagine that!) can take orders or answer questions at 888-921-SKIN (7546). Blow Up 2 is also available worldwide through stores, catalogs, and resellers. Free upgrades are available to purchasers of Blow Up 1 who purchased after July 26, 2008.