Plug-In Software - Genuine Fractals 5

With Genuine Fractals seeing really is believing

Genuine Fractals™ Print Pro V5 (£161.69 ex-vat)
Genuine Fractals™ V5 (£85.10 ex-vat)

DCP Systems provide FREE Hotline Technical Support and Extended Download Service on software products purchased from this site only. Call 0114 257 3640 for further details

(Genuine Fractals v5 is compatible with Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3 and Photoshop Elements 4.0 and higher)

 

ABOUT THE PRODUCT

Enlarge your images over 1000% with no loss in image quality. Genuine Fractals 5 simply produces higher quality and sharper results than traditional scaling methods in Photoshop® or in any other third party product.

The Industry Standard for Image Enlargement

Genuine Fractals 5 is the industry standard for image resizing. It's renowned across the photographic and printing industries for its ability to increase image size well over 1000% without the loss of sharpness or detail that you would normally expect. Its patented, fractal based interpolation algorithms work like nothing else and the results speak for themselves.

What's New in Genuine Fractals 5

Genuine Fractals 5 is a revolutionary step forward for image enlargements. We've taken the industry standard and given it a complete overhaul. New scaling technology, faster performance, new features, new user interface, greater ease of use and much more. Compare Genuine Fractals 5 to any Photoshop scaling method or other third party plug-in, Genuine Fractals 5 is the industry standard in image resizing.

APPLICATION:

BUREAU: Enables low resolution files to be enlarged to extremely large sizes and printed with no pixelation issues.

DIGITAL CAMERA: Why spend thousands on a high end digital camera back when you can achieve similar results from a camera costing a fraction of the price. Today s 3 to 4 megapixel digital cameras produce excellent output at 5" x 4" but what happens when the output needs to be 40" x 30"? Digital Cameras make it easy for a photographer to recompose an image, this can cause problems due to the cropped image being to low resolution. Genuine Fractals provides solutions to all these problems by repurposing the image and producing a file that matches the required output.

REPRO: The only way to avoid working on large scans used to be by spending thousands on an OPI (Open Prepress Interface) Server, with Genuine Fractals you can save time, money, reduce your storage capacity and improve your workflow. Start with a low to medium resolution image and when your done retouching or colour correcting encode the file within Genuine Fractals, the file can then be repurposed to suit your requirement. For example, as a web image, a catalogue image, a poster or even as a billboard.

• New scaling algorithm - We overhauled the patented scaling algorithm to now allow for over 1000% enlargements with no loss in detail
• Multi-processor Support - Optimized for multiple processors, including CPU hardware acceleration (SSE/AltiVec), up to 10x faster than the previous version
• Document Size Presets - Crop and resize your image in a single step
• Robust Layer Support - Supports Layers, Paths & Alpha Channels
• Texture Controls - Get that extra bit of detail out of your images
• Sharpening Controls - Save time by sharpening for output right in Genuine Fractals
• Film Grain Controls - Add simulated Film Grain for and extra sharp look
• Photoshop Action Support - Record actions for multiple sizes, batch process an entire folder easily
• New User Interface - Make your image the star of the show, not just a bunch of dials
  
• Support for Photoshop CS3 - Universal Binary means fast native support for Intel processor powered Macintosh systems
• LAB Color Mode Support - Added Support for 8 & 16-bit LAB & Grayscale images
• "Show Me How" Tutorial Videos - New built-in videos so you get the most out of Genuine Fractals
• Automatic Update Checking - Make sure you always have the latest version

MORE INFO:

How Many Pixels Do I Need?

That's a common question that we hear. To answer it you need to know two things, the size of the print you need to make and the resolution that your printer needs for the best results.

The size of the print is simply however large your printer can handle. The resolution that your printer needs may be a little trickier to figure out. Resolution is the density of the pixels for a given distance, usually measured in pixels or dots per inch. Most modern inkjet printers print anywhere from 1200 to 4800 dots per inch (what the printer manufacturers really mean is 1200-4800 droplets of ink per inch). Inkjet printers use many tiny round droplets of relatively few, 4-8 ink colors to reproduce one square pixel in your image that could be any of millions of colors. A common mistake is to set the resolution of the file to the resolution of the printer. In all but a few special printers this will result in huge files that will not print well, if at all.

The secret is that the human eye can not see much more than 250-300 pixels per inch. So the ideal resolution for your files should be close to this and be an even multiple of the printers resolution.

Once you know the print size and resolution it is easy to use Genuine Fractals 5 to resize your file to the desired output. Simply input the resolution and then either the print width or height. You'll see that the corresponding dimension is automatically filled in by Genuine Fractals 5 based on the proportions of your image.

Keep the proportions in mind because the proportions of films, digital camera sensors and papers can all be different. For example most digital cameras sensors are proportioned so that the height is two thirds the width or 1:1.5; While the most common paper size, in the US, is letter which is 8.5x11 inches or a about 1:1.25.

These kinds of proportion mis-matches are common and require that the original image be cropped to fit the proportions of the paper size. If your image cannot be cropped without ruining the composition then you will need to adjust your print size to longer dimension.

Why should I use Genuine Fractals 5?

Resizing an image larger than the original size requires that new pixels be created. This process is called interpolation or up-rezzing. There are many mathematical ways, called algorithms, to do this. The most common method used by default by many pixel editing applications is called Bicubic Interpolation. Bicubic along with with its newer variants bicubic smoother and bicubic sharper work by averaging a small group of neighboring pixels to determine the color value of the new pixels to be added. While this technique is fast, it does not distinguish edges so there is a uniform loss of sharpness and detail across the image.

Genuine Fractals 5 patented algorithms work differently. It starts by analyzing ever-decreasing sizes of pixel blocks in your image looking for repeating natural patterns at different sizes. These are known as fractals. Fractals are common, naturally repeating patterns found everywhere. For example, a river system viewed from space has the same shape as the veins in a leaf. These are both fractal patterns at very different scales. The great thing about fractal patterns is once you find them they can be scaled to any size without loss in detail. This allows Genuine Fractals 5 to resize your image over 1000% without losing sharpness and edge detail.

Unmatched Image Resizing

Genuine Fractals 5 can resize your images over 1000% and still maintain sharp edges and minute details. To give you an idea of how big that is, you could take a full-frame image from a six megapixel image and resize it to make a print of 10x15 feet at 180 ppi! It is a must for any photographer or artist who makes large format or poster sized prints.

It is also great for journalists, sports and wildlife photographers who may need to take a cropped section of an image and still make a high-quality print from it. Cropping can leave you with very few pixels to work with.

Save Hard Disk Space and Bandwidth

Increasing the size and resolution of a file results in a larger file on disk. You can reduce the disk space needed and bandwidth when transferring files by saving your files into the Genuine Fractals 5 .STN format which provides lossless and visually lossless wavelet compression to cut your file size in half or more. Now you can store twice as many images on your hard drive and upload them in half the time. Long time users of Genuine Fractals remember having to save files as a .STN file before being able to scale the image. In Genuine Fractals 5, any file that is opened in Photoshop can be scaled in one easy step without having to save as a .STN file first.

Broad File Support

If you work in a strict CMYK color workflow and need to increase the resolution of your images, look no further than Genuine Fractals Print Pro 5. Based on the same fractal-based scaling method as the standard edition of Genuine Fractals 5, Genuine Fractals Print Pro 5 adds support for CMYK images in addition to RGB, LAB and Grayscale images.

Batch Processing with Genuine Fractals 5

Genuine Fractals 5 can be automated easily by using a Photoshop action. By default, Genuine Fractals 5 remembers its last used setting - however, you can create a Photoshop action to resize an entire folder of images at the same time.

Not Just for Photographers

Genuine Fractals 5 is not just for Photographers, but anyone who needs to resize images. Graphic designers can end the everyday problem of receiving low resolution images from clients for high resolution print work. Genuine Fractals 5 can also help you create tradeshow and billboard graphics from average sized images. Genuine Fractals 5 is also commonly used by service bureaus as well as law enforcement and architects for resizing small files.

System Requirements

Windows XP & Vista
Plug-in version: 5.0
Windows XP or Vista

Mac OS X
Plug-in version: 5.0
Mac OS X 10.4.4 or 10.5 and higher

Common
Adobe Photoshop CS2 and CS3 and Photoshop Elements 4.0 and higher

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