Genuine Fractals for Mac

User Reviews

• The Jury's Back In on Version 4

  Paul VMarch 1, 2005

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Okay, in response to my last post, customer service wrote me back today. Perhaps I missed it in the directions, but you access it now through the "Automate" menu. Once I got that, all is working well again and I'm happy to recommend GF to anyone. It's a nice program and just got better.

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• Ideal Pro Photo Software

  rpphoto555October 23, 2004

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Every pro photographer I know uses Genuine Fractals, and has done so for years. The Extensis PXL product works just as well, and works directly on open files, but costs more. The raw plug-in in Photoshop 7 and CS also has a high-quality up-scaling engine, but only raw files are available. Photoshop CS also has new option in the scaling interpolation dialog called "bicubic smoother" that increases the quality of upscaled images (and bicubic sharper to increase the quality of downscaled images). Extensis and Genuine Fractals also improve the quality of downscaled images over Photoshop, with an increase of detail and sharpness. Genuine Fractals works better than the PS methods, and Extensis doesn't support 16 bits yet, a prefered photographers' photo file. GF does, the third-party king! Another benefit is that you can save high-resolution files that are completely lossless and the file size is much smaller for storage. The one drawback I've seen is that (aside from the high price) some cataloging apps doen't work with GF, although I haven't tried the 3.5 version for that yet.

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• Great PRO Product

  dmarcootOctober 23, 2004

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Belongs in every proffesional designers tool kit. if your an amatuer and cant understand the price, well, thats why your an amatuer.... time is money, this saves money....

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• superb

  michael clarkeFebruary 4, 2004

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />this software is simply unparalleled... i've been using the trial version all day to produce a 6-foot poster using 6-inch images (lots of detail, hair/fur), and the enlarged images - 400% or more - actually look better than the originals, as hard to believe as that might be; PapaTonyinSD, this software is in an entirely different league than what your article is discussing... this is a serious production tool, and certainly worth the affordable asking price

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• Pretty Good

  t.spoonOctober 16, 2003

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I've been testing this out- it's pretty good at what it does, althouhg I have some doubts about the validity of the claims they make. I tried testing this using images with really sharp lines. Like black text. I know the goal is to blow up photographs, but what we want to see of it can do is distinguish signal from noise and amplify the signal, rathe than blowing it up and smoothing out the noise. "Smoothing out the noise" is just bicubic interpolation- anything can do that for you. I compared GF with three photoshop methods- 1. Plain bicubic inerpolation 2. blow-up to double the increase you really want using bicubic interpolation, gaussian blur at 1 pixel, then halve the size (to the goal resolution) with bicubic interpolation again 3. increase the resolution stepwise by recording an action of bicubic interpolation enlargement at 110%, and then replay this action until reaching the desired size. I blew everything up to 600%. On any part of the image that had enough pixels together to define a border, GF killed all other methods. It yielded dramatically superior results. For really small, spotty bits, it didn't fare so well. On these parts, the progressive 110% enlargements roked better. As a whole, I'd say GF is pretty good. However, they claim you can "Save the expense of scanning high-resolution images and save time editing those images in Photoshop. With LizardTech's Genuine Fractals you can start with a low- to medium-resolution image..." To this extent, they are being absurd. If you scan an original image in twice the quality (and the image has that much quality, you're not just assigning more pixels to the film grain), it'll look much better than any algorithmic enlargement GF is going to do. GF can't make up things that were there in the orignal image that didn't come through when you scan. Anyway, it does a good job at enlarging what you've got, but I certainly wouldn't throw away real resolution in a sharp picture and expect GF to bring it back for you later.

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• No better than Photoshop for enlargements

  TGDJune 28, 2003

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />This product may allow you to work on medium res images in place of high res ones and then allow you to print at the original high res without loss - I haven't tried it for that. But users should not be fooled into thinking this product can enlarge images to 600% without image quality loss. The enlargements this software creates are certainly better than simply doubling pixles, and will allow a fairly effective doubling of res with fair image quality. But faceting artifacts are evident immediately upon enlargement. Further, basic Photoshop methods can produce enlargements that are at least equal if not superior to the fractal software's results. The Photoshop method is just as quick too: enlarge image to 2400% of original, apply a 50% Gaussian blur at radius 1 pixel, reduce image to 600% of original. The only reason you might need Genuine fractal for enlargement is if you do not have enough RAM to enlarge to 2400%. In that case - go buy some RAM you can get a gig for a little more than the price of the software.

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• jasonhunt--2008March 17, 2003

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  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Well I think it's an excellent product, and contrary to other comments, it works just fine under 10.2 for me. very stable, fast enough, and

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