Product Reviews

When Extensis divested itself of its Photoshop plug-ins, the pick of the crop was snapped up by onOne. It has now bundled Intellihance Pro 4, MaskPro 3 and PhotoFrame Pro 2.5 with the innovative Genuine Fractals 4.1 into one plug-in suite.

Genuine Fractals uses fractal compression techniques to enlarge digital images. Photoshop's built-in bicubic interpolation tends to produce enlarged images that are fuzzy and indistinct, particularly at the borders between areas of differing contrast. Genuine Fractals, on the other hand, creates smooth, crisp edges that allow for far greater enlargements than can be achieved using Photoshop alone.

Genuine Fractals was originally designed as an archiving tool that would save images at a tiny size that could then be reopened at much larger sizes. Throughout its first three versions, the process entailed a cumbersome save-to-disk and re-import procedure, but now the whole process can be performed directly within Photoshop, with near-instant previews of the finished result.

Images scaled in this way are clearly crisper, with sharper edges and a far lower degree of apparent pixellation. However, there's also a corresponding smoothing within areas of similar tone: these areas are flattened out tonally, with some loss of fine detail. The effect is similar to that seen when applying Photoshop's Median filter to an image: the pixellation may disappear, but it's replaced by a marked colour-by-numbers effect, as contrasting areas are grouped together in blocks of similar colour.

It's also worth noting that Genuine Fractals works only in RGB, although it does support 16-bit images. The enlargement process works better for some images than others. Faces generally work well, but images

Mask Pro 3, like the other plug-ins acquired from Extensis, remains unchanged in this release. Like Genuine Fractals, it promises rather more than it can deliver: its claim that it can create cutouts from background objects with ease is somewhat misleading. Certainly, Mask Pro is capable of sophisticated cutout operations, but that takes time and effort. Photoshop's own image extraction technology has almost overtaken it, to the point where Mask Pro begins to seem clumsy and overblown.

PhotoFrame Pro 2.5 offers thousands of framing solutions, from realistic wood effects to ragged, avant garde borders. A frame browser gives access to all the frames and textures. While the more textural frames are distinctive and highly usable, the more traditional effects have a tendency to look rather synthetic compared with, for example, the frame component of AlienSkin's Splat! plug-in suite.

The functionality of Intellihance Pro 3 is extensive. As well as a simple one-click automatic enhancement, Intellihance provides a high degree of user control, taking the grid system used in Photoshop's own Variations adjustment and extending it immensely. You can choose to view the grid as repeated copies of the same portion, or as the entire image split into strips. You can preview up to 25 variations together, showing variations in contrast, brightness, saturation, colour cast and sharpness, as well as noise and scratch removal. Combining power with ease of use, Intellihance remains a useful and intuitive tool whose batch processing capabilities enable the automatic enhancement of a range of images in one go.

Although the former Extensis plug-ins haven't been updated, buying the bundle will provide an easy upgrade path for future enhancements, the first of which, PhotoFrame 3, has already been announced. The core component, Genuine Fractals, will either work for you or not, depending on the sort of image you need to enlarge; the 30-day free trial version should give you long enough to test it. It's not quite the Holy Grail that Photoshop users have been searching for, but it's the closest solution yet.