Image upsizing shootout: Photoshop vs Perfect Resize

[Promit]

Recently, the product Perfect Resize was recommended to me as an excellent way to get more pixels out of less:
Genuine Fractals is now Perfect Resize 7 - onOne Software
I was fairly curious, so I thought I'd give it a shot. What follows is a relatively quick test of the product (trial version) in a 200% resize challenge versus Photoshop's built in resizing. The test subject is a real photo from my E-PL1 that I resized to 3 MP to control noise, and subsequently lost the original of. (D'oh!) I'm showing 100% crops of the resized image.

If you really want to compare these in detail, I recommend opening them in three separate tabs and switching between. The crops are not exactly identical, I apologize for that.

#1: Nearest neighbor resize. This is equivalent to a 200% magnification of a not resized image.

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#2: Photoshop bicubic smooth resize, followed by Auto Sharpen.

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#3: Perfect Resize at 200%, high detail preset.

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Finally, this is a composite of all three resize versions, in horizontal stripes at roughly 1/3. Try and guess which stripe is which method.

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[Promit]

My take: Perfect Resize is a $100 product which claims that images can be resized up to 1000%. That is obviously a very bold claim, and I am not impressed with its work at 200%. I can make out subtle differences in how bicubic has rendered the photo versus nearest neighbor. Lines are handled much better and the sharpening holds together well. However, the Perfect Resize image looks dead identical to the bicubic sharpened. I cannot reliably tell the difference between the two.

On the bright side, bicubic + sharpen holds together well enough at 200% that I think I'd be okay printing it for casual purposes.

 

[mcasan]

Perfect Resize is a $100 product

OnOne's Perfect Resize is $79 as a standalone app. But you can get the entire Suite for $99.
http://www.on1.com/products/resize9/

 

[tkbslc]

Why do you want to resize it? 3MP is big enough for almost any monitor display and if it is for printing, I'd bet the printer will interpolate better than your software.

 

[barry]

How about resizing images with help of some SDKs. Any codes about it? Thanks in advance.

Hi Peter,

1. you seem to be setting your text color to BLACK (#000000), which is a problem for those of us who use the 'Dark' forum theme here.

2. If you're looking for something like ImageMagick (free), they have lots of info on resizing on their support/documentation site & forums.

Otherwise, you'd need to read the SDK docs and follow image processing conventions if you are planning to write your own programs or scripts using an SDK.

Barry