Mac World: Image-Scaling Plug-Ins: Genuine Fractals PrintPro 3.0 and pxl SmartScale Prove That You Can Get Big Results from Small Packages

The rather inelegant adage "garbage in, garbage out" is not always true. LizardTech's Genuine Fractals PrintPro 3.0 and Extensis's new pxl SmartScale -- plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop -- rework this old equation. Both let you take images previously considered too small for anything other than the Web and enlarge them with enough clarity and image integrity for print output. (The plug-ins are compatible with Adobe Photoshop 6.01 and higher.) You'll get astoundingly good results -- either product can scale an image to as much as, and in some cases more than, 16 times its original size. But while Genuine Fractals is powerful, its somewhat quirky workflow is less intuitive than pxl SmartScale's straightforward, get-it-done interface.