Two things about the image above: First, it is taken with a BlackBerry; and second, it is set at 600px wide, the average size of images on Doobybrain.com.
When I’m making a post for the site, I try my hardest to find an image that is already larger than 600px wide so that I can resize it down and not worry about losing much quality from the original image. Occasionally, I’ll get an image that is slightly smaller than ideal and I’ll run it through my 110% enlargement action in Photoshop to get it bigger while retaining the most image quality (standard resizing in Photoshop sucks, especially if you’re enlarging an image — so if you’re not running a plugin, 110% over and over is your best bet).
But now that I’ve installed the Genuine Fractals plugin, my Photoshop life has been changed forever! I successfully converted the image above to be 1000px wide and it looks almost the same quality as it did when it was 600px wide.
Of course, if you’ve got a bad image to begin with, your enlargement will only be as good as your original, so Genuine Fractals is best reserved for final work that you need to have printed at a different output size. And yes, this plugin works wonders on cellphone pictures. Yippee!
