Have Camera Will Travel

Image Resizing Software. Is it worth the money?  I tested Perfect Resize 7.0 Professional against Adobe Lightroom 3.3 and I have the answer.

A friend recently sent out a email about the new version of Genuine Fractals being available, now called Perfect Resize 7.0. This got an interesting conversation started through e-mail and I knee-jerk responded that it was a waste of money as you can do just as good a job uprezing your images with Photoshop or Lightroom. I based my knee-jerk response on a previous comparison I did a few years ago. But...that was a few years ago, so I think it may be prudent to revisit the matter with the most recent versions of both programs.

So...I downloaded the free 30 day trial of Perfect Resize 7.0 and compared its ability to resize an image with that of Adobe Lightroom 3.x. The master file was a raw file from a Canon EOS 50D, converted to a native resolution, unsharpened 16 bit tiff file. I uprezed the master image with both programs on my Mac, using default settings, to a resolution of 24 x 36 inches at 300 ppi. This is a significant resizing of the image, upwards from 15 megapixels to about 77.8 megapixels.

The end result. Both programs are producing the same amount of detail in the uprezed images and Adobe lightroom is doing it with fewer artifacts in the image. Not only that, but Lightroom does the conversion in about 1/5th the time it takes for Perfect Resize to make the same conversion.

I can still say in confidence, Lightroom does a better job and that buying Perfect Resize 7.0 as an image resizing program is still a waste of money. Any doubts, send me an email, I'll send you a link where you can download the master images and you can pixel peep them yourself.

If you have Adobe Lightroom, save your $300 for a sharper lens. If you don't have Adobe Lightroom, go buy it instead of Perfect Resize if you need to resize images for printing.

Fools and their money are soon separated.

Perfect Resize Uprezzed

Master Unrezzed

Lightroom UpRez