Genuine Fractals Review

UPDATED – 06/03/2010 to reflect the new release of Genuine Fractals that works with Aperture 3 64-bt

As I’ve mentioned before, all the pictures on my site are shot with my Nikon P6000. Though it’s slightly better than most point and shoot cameras, it does not have the same size sensor as even most entry level DSLRs. This causes a couple of problems, including some issues with noise at ISO 800 or above and the lack of capability to add longer lenses to increase zoom capabilities. In order to compensate for the lack of zoom, I normally end up cropping my pictures to get the desired framing that I would have wanted from a zoom lens. Cropping an image in this manner, however, can mean the resulting image files are not big enough for larger prints. This is where Genuine Fractals comes in. Genuine Fractals, from onOne Software, is an image re-sizing and enlargement program (that recently got some coverage on CSI:NY) that I now use on nearly all of my photos before I sent them off to WHCC for printing.

The biggest selling point of Genuine Fractals is its ability to increase an image size “up to 800%”. Though I have not gone as large as 800% on any of my increases, I have done 400% and 500%, and the results were excellent. One of the prints prominently featured on my wall is a shot of my parents that was just one small piece of a larger scene I photographed. After some major cropping and a trip through Genuine Fractals, I now have a gorgeous and memorable photo.

Though I do use Genuine Fractal’s enlargement capabilities fairly regularly, I don’t use them nearly as much as I use Genuine Fractal’s basic cropping functionality. Unlike cropping in Photoshop, Genuine Fractal’s crop feature is extremely intuitive. It allows you to fix one of the dimensions as you resize the other so that you can quickly and easily crop to your desired dimensions, whether that is 4×6, 8×10, 16×20, etc… Since I started taking pictures, I have always cropped my photos in the way I think frames the shot the best, not taking into account an particular size related issues. This meant that when someone asked for a print of one of my photos, I frequently would have to play around in Photoshop to get some version of my photo into their requested size. Now, however, that process is extremely quick and easy with Genuine Fractals, especially since Genuine Fractals Pro can be launched directly from within Aperture (see NOTE at the end of this post for discussion about Aperture 3).

Could I use Photoshop for everything I do in Genuine Fractals? Of course. Do I think Genuine Fractals was worth the investment to increase my work flow speed and print quality? Without a doubt. Ultimately, Genuine Fractals has resulted in me creating better quality prints, with a workflow that is much faster. I really cannot not ask for more from a piece of software than that..

NOTE: As I write this review, Genuine Fractals is only available as a 32-bit Aperture plugin. This means that if you normally run Aperture 3 in its default 64-bit mode, you’ll have to restart Aperture 3 in 32-bit mode to use Genuine Fractals. Additionally, though I never had a single problem with the round trip from Aperture to Genuine Fractals and back to Aperture with Aperture 2, I’ve had some issues with this round trip in Aperture 3. I hope that issue is corrected when onOne updates their plugins to 32-bit 64-bit

UPDATE: OnOne has released an updated version of Genuine Fractals that works with the 64-bit version of Aperture 3. I have been using it for a little over a week and have had no issues (most importantly, the roundtrip issue I was having with the previous version). It even seems particularly snappy. Since I’ve been getting more and more requests for prints of my work (at varying sizes), Genuine Fractals has become an even more integral part of my workflow. I use it for all my photo resizing and print preparation.