Software Review: onOne Genuine Fractals

Hello all. Thanks for checking out this week's software review of one of best tools available from onOne Software, Genuine Fractals.

So here's the deal. Of all the onOne tools, this one has had the most effect on the output quality of my printed images, and that is exciting. This is one of those tools that is extremely specific to accomplishing a certain task - namely, big high-detail enlargements. If you don't print things big, you probably don't need to mess with it. 

But if you do like to print stuff large, and I can speak from experience - nothing works better at enlarging images for print than Genuine Fractals - you'll just have to trust me, try it out, and see for yourself. 

With that said, I could end the review, but I would like to mention the other nice thing about GF, it's incredibly easy to use. If you're familiar with resizing images in photoshop, using the basic functions in GF is as easy if not easier.

Like everything else in the Plug-In Suite, you can find Genuine Fractals under the onOne menu in Photoshop. For this discussion, we'll look at the interface for regular and express mode. GF also has a powerful batch processing component, but we'll save that for another day.

Here we see the full version of the tool. For simplicity, I've minimized most of the menus on the right sidebar of the screen. I've left open the screen and print size controls so you can see just how similar they are to what you'll find in Photoshop. On top of these simple controls, when you start to play with things like textures, sharpening, film grain, etc. the folks at onOne have built an extremely efficient WYSIWYG display which updates with a preview of your tweaks in almost real-time.

So you just want to resize without messing with all the other stuff? Fire up the "express" version of GF and you get a very familiar control box (straight from the full version, and much like photoshop's native tool).

I really provided my summary at the beginning of this post. Until I tried Genuine Fractals, I had always thought that photoshop's bicubic smoother did just fine. But I suggest you do the same experiment I did. If you're willing, download the free trial of GF, and print a 12MP image at say, 20x30, upsized with GF. You WILL see a difference in sharpness, and you won't go back to what your were using before.

Make sure you check back next Wednesday when we review, PhotoFrame 4 Professional Edition.

If this, or any of onOne's software interests you, the folks at onOne have generously provided a 20% discount to all of my readers. Simply click on the link below to go the onOne store, and enter coupon code "TJP10" at checkout to receive your discount.