Discuss this story
Inexpensive Photoshop plug-in for large and small image re-sizing
Fulvio Senore, of the Italian software house, FSoft s.r.l., has been in touch with us concerning his company’s new filter plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, called Resize Magic. It’s an image resize tool using a modified Lanczos algorithm. It will also work with a number of packages other than Photoshop that have a Photoshop plug-in compatibility feature. It's also modestly priced at EU€24, about UKŁ17 or US$28.
According to Fulvio, Resize Magic is both good at making images larger, but exceptionally good at reducing the sizes of images: “Resize Magic is designed to reduce images with the maximum quality too. It's hard to believe, but Photoshop and similar programs are really weak when they reduce the size of images: if you reduce a lot you obtain a blurred image. Most resizing plug-ins and programs do not create good images when reducing, too.”
Fulvio adds: “Resize Magic resizes images directly into your graphic program. You will see the result in the same window as the starting image, and you will be able to step back and forth with the Undo and Redo commands.
“All other products, as far as we know, are export plugins: you must save the image in an external file and open it in another window to see the result, and you can get "profile mismatch" messages.”
There is an interactive online demo comparing re-sized images produced natively by popular image editing packages and Resize Magic. These samples, plus download access to the software can be found at: www.fsoft.it/imaging
According to Fulvio, Resize Magic is the predursor to a Photoshop-specific plug-in that will be simpler to use, easier to automate with actions and more powerful (supporting monochrome and CMYK) images, for example. Unlike the current version of Resize Magic, which has been tested on a number of packages that accept Photoshop plug-ins, the later version will only work with Adobe Photoshop.
Discuss this story
