Alien Skin Software, makers of photoshop plugins, have released Blow Up, for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. This their latest offering gives the highest quality image enlargement available basically simplifying and improving image enlargement, making it easy to convert web graphics to print and create large format and gallery prints from digital photographs.

Blow Up scales image up to 10000% - 10 times in each dimension - with no stairstep, halo, or fringe artifacts. The plugin supports CMYK, RGB, Lab, Grayscale, and Duotone image modes and can resize multi-layered documents without the need to flatten first. It also works with 8-, 16- and 32-bit compositions, including RAW and HDR images. Blow-Up can resize an image in a new document, leaving the original untouched.

The Blow Up plugin is available for $199. Registered users of other Alien Skin products receive discount pricing when ordering direct. Online ordering can be made at http://www.alienskin.com.

1. During the months of July and August anyone visiting the the London Eye will also have the opportunity to look at the winning entries from the 2005 International Travel Photographer of the Year competition.
2. Google is currently testing a new version of its photo-management app Picasa in private beta that will let users post photo albums on the web via an integrated, Google-hosted service. You can learn some more about the service or put yourself on the beta waiting list at the Picasa Web site. See DownLoad Squad for details.
3. Wired News is running an interesting piece about Flickr's policy which excludes images from being displayed in public areas of the site or global search results if more than half of the uploader's images are "non-photographic images." The rationale seems to be that when people come to Flickr they're looking for photos, not screenshots or other images. (also via Download Squad)
4. Flock is now in beta mode. Lots of new features for photo management, feed-reading, search, favorites, and blogging. Take a look at the Flock blog for lots of juicy details, or hit the download site to grab Flock for Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.
5. Superb stop-motion tour of the Pyrimids over on Yakkr.com. (found via Gadling)
6. Don't know quite why you would want to but the Digital Photography School shows how to get your images to look like Lomo photos. A Lomo is a Russian manufactured camera. It is poorly made and known for its less than perfect image quality.

Picture from the Digital Photograhy Flickr Group Electirc Scream by CyberGus.

 

AmphiSoft Photo Sharpen is a Photoshop plug-in for advanced photo sharpening without forming halos. (I mentioned another site offering tips on halo removal the other day) It provides object edge sharpen and general sharpen algorithms.

AmphiSoft is fully compatible with various image editors, like Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Fireworks, JASC, Corel and Ulead image editors, and numerous freeware like IrfanView and XnView. The plug-in works with 8bit per channel and 16bit per channel RGB images.

The latest version 1.1 has improved rendering and a scaleable dialog window. It costs US$29.

According to Macworld UK, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen on Friday repeated his earlier statement that the company has no plans to release a universal binary of Photoshop for Mactel owners until CS3 ships next Spring. Until then, PS users will have to suffer with Rosetta, or hold off on upgrades. Since Apple hasn't moved any the high-end machines creative Core Duo yet (and why? The G5 Quad is still in its infancy), this really isn't as big a deal as some people have made it out to be, although early MacBook Pro adopters are undoubtedly disappointed. On the one had, it  does seem like Adobe is ignoring Mac users, but by the time Adobe's real core constituency--creative professionals--have high-power Apple Intel workstations available to them and start to make the switch, CS3 will be just around the corner, if not rolling off the presses.

In other news, Chizen did promise a universal binary of Acrobat 8 when it ships in the fall, and restated Adobe's commitment to OS X, despite speculation that Boot Camp might be a disincentive to developers.

[via TUPW]