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This is a video review of onOne Perfect Resize. This is stand alone software, or also available
as part of the Perfect Photo Suite package. Iím going to have one image on the left side,
which is currently called ëTrees Photoshopí. The one on the right is called ëTrees Perfect
Resizeí. Currently both these images are at around 7 inches wide. In order to overemphasize
what the software is capable of doing, Iím going to change the width to 36 inches for
both images.
Then for perfect resize weíre going to go down to File ñ Automate ñ Perfect Resize.
When the software comes up you get a full view of what youíre working on. You can also
use the magnifying glass to zoom in any particular area. You can see in real time what itís
going to be doing as youíre working on the image.
Iím going to change the width to 36 inches. Iím going to scroll down a bit. Now I have
different control options of: General Purpose, Low Res., .JPG, Portrait, Landscape, High
Detail, and Custom. Basically these are different presets to move around the slider. If I change
this to Portrait it just quickly makes the necessarily changes.
For this particular image Iím going to make it 5, Iím going to make it 50, just for an
example. You can see how it really overemphasizes the noise that was originally in the image.
Iím going to bring that back down to a landscape, which I find just gives the best overall results.
I go down to Sharpening. Your sharpening method is Unsharp Mask, High Pass, and Progressive.
I played around with the different options. I find them to be fairly irrelevant. It really
didnít matter. I could get the same results whichever way that I did it. I found that
the Highlights and Shadows option also didnít do anything particularly useful, however the
amount of High Pass that I put on the image definitely, once again, gives you more detail
going on within the image, which in this case is bringing out more of the noise.
Iím going to bring it down to 110, because for this tutorial Iím trying to show you
what the software is in fact capable of doing. Iím going to come over here to the other
side, here, which is something that weíre going to be looking at.
The options down here, Film Grain, adds noise to the image. If I raise that up, see? Iím
not using Film Grain in my experimentations. Iím not using any tiling, or Gallery Wrap,
because weíre not doing special effects. Weíre simply trying to sharpen an image.
These other effects I would do separately within Photoshop itself, but as most of these
programs with the Perfect Photo Suite are standalones, you donít actually need Photoshop
to use Perfect Resize. It does have some extra features that you wonít use as a plug-in.
Iím going to make settings here. Iím going to make that five, then Iím going to process
this out. Then weíll take a look at the differences. It does take about two minutes to resize an
image of this size, which is about 3í wide.
To make this a fair fight Iím going to use Filter ñ Sharpen ñ Unsharp Mask for the
left side image. The
definition from the left to the right is significant. You can see that when thereís a light and
a dark next to each other it creates a sharper edge than what is available within Photoshop.
Iíve tried to duplicate the action to see it do the same thing, but I canít. I was
just doing more damage to the image.
Something that youíll notice is when I manually do it in Photoshop the end result is an image
that is darker than what is seen within the Perfect Resize. Perfect Resize does not fill
in the blacks quite as much.
One of
the benefits of the Perfect Resize is I can go in here and I have more control than I
originally did in Photoshop. Iím going to overemphasize these edges so that you can
really see what the program can do. After changing some settings you can now see some
significant differences where itís creating these harder edges between the lights and
the darks. Itís not overemphasizing the noise thatís currently in the image. The reason
is that the noise, the color tone within the noise is subtle, which it allows for, as you
can see. But itís emphasizing the sharp contrast between the dark and the light.
If I go back over here
you can see how itís created this really sharp edge between the contrasts of the dark
and the light. Keep in mind this is blowing up an already grainy image to be 3í wide,
which is certainly impressive.
Hereís an example where Iím going to make the image size starting with 3.5 inches, weíre
going to take this one up to 11 inches, for an 8.5 inches x 11 inches, which would otherwise
be good for a single page in a magazine.
Iím going to go down to Perfect Resize, once again. Iím going to put these settings of
11 inches wide. Iím going to actually make this one landscape, which I found gave me
the best results. Then Iím going to do a High Pass. This one was going to be small.
I was only going to do a very subtle sharpen on this one. Then Apply. This one takes about
30 seconds to process.
Once again, because of the sharp contrast of the light and the dark itís clearly obvious
what itís done to this image, where itís created these very sharp edges as the image
became blown up. Again you can see with the tower in the background that what it did was
it created a sharp definition within that object.
Now what this is a good example of is the way that you can take a low mega pixel camera,
two mega pixel, or something from a phone perhaps, who knows, and blow it up to something
thatís of a size that you can hang up on a wall of a 8.5 inches x 11 inches.
This last example is also a 3.5 inches, and Iím going to make it another 8.5 inches x
11 inches. The reason that I chose this image was because of the harsh lines. You can see
major pixelation, sharp edges, very pixilated edges that are going on this image. I want
to show you what happens when Perfect Resize gets involved and does something with not
only the lights and the darks, but also with these pre-existing problems of these jagged
edges.
Once again, Iím just going to go through the motions of the different settings and
Iím going to come up with something and show you how that looks.
Iím going to go back to the Photoshop image, and Iím going to give it a sharpened Unsharp
mask. It should be pretty obvious to you what itís doing. Itís having a very hard time
trying to create these lines without adding the distortion within the image. Isnít that
interesting? In this case I donít think I can actually get a good sharpening out of
this.
As you can see Perfect Resize did an amazing job on this image. You can see down the side
of his face. You can see the sharp lines
within here. Itís done a very, very good job in the sharpening. This is why I chose
this image to show you what this program really was capable of doing. I worked on this image
for quite some time and I could not duplicate the detail in Photoshop that this program
was able to do by itself.
In conclusion I definitely have to say that Perfect Resize was a much, much better program
to do certain types of sharpening than the built in Photoshop program was. While it wasnít
100% perfect in all cases, primarily the better the image already was, Perfect Resize wasnít
able to do any better of a job, however the worse the image was Perfect Resize did an
amazing job at retain the details and blowing up these images to sizes that it otherwise
should not be blow up to.
If you like this video review, please go to http://www.theartofretouching.com where we
have reviews of other products and video tutorials on how to use Photoshop, as well as other
tips and tricks.