If you have ever had problems with using low resolution images or only having low resolution images and needing them to be a lot bigger then you could possibly manipulate and still keep the image looking nice? Yeah, we all have. Alien Skin however has realised this and come out with Alien Skin Blow Up. Which will pretty much do just that.The new plugin for Adobe Photoshop is of course made by the same company that made Eyecandy, the ever popular plugin until CS2 came out. Once CS2 came out the plugin has been pretty much useless because Adobe included almost all of the features in CS2 that Eyecandy could produce. Hopefully the same will happen with Blow Up, not because I don’t like Alien Skin but because I feel that Adobe does things better and it should be a feature of Photoshop.

At any rate, the plugin will basically take a small image and make it much bigger without losing anywhere near the quality that you would if you were to just resize the image. It is extremely simple and to the point, you basically just select what size you want the image to be and then adjust the scroll bars for the Sharpen amount and the Add Grain option.

With Alien Skin Blow Up you can obviously change the action pixels from 400x400 to 800x800 but you can also change the dpi (dots per inch) so if you have found a web image that is 72dpi and you want to change it to 150dpi for a magazine or a print job then you can do that easily. All of the specifics obviously depend on the image and what quality it is anyway. This new plugin just helps the process and hopefully alleviates some of the stress of using or reusing images that we have all had to deal with in the past.

Website: http://alienskin.com
Price: $199

Popularity: 3%