That last link is very old by a few years.  GF is now owned by OnOne
software and it's version 4, no saving stn files anymore.  And it goes
up to 800%.

But thanks for the Clarkvision link, don't want to spend more money
these days.  Currently I have GF 2.5 and have happily used it since I
bought it, with perfect results.

Because of this thread I tested CS1's bicubic work for both sharper
and smoother against GF 2.5 as follows:

800 x 600 x 72ppi  to  4800 x 3600 x 300ppi (600% up)

I had never tested this before since PS 5, and was quite pleasently
surprized!  PS's BC smoother is perfect.  Should I upgrade GF for
$69?  Maybe not!

I haven't tried this filter but the examples I saw didn't seem to look
any better than what you can get with Photoshop, for example these two
pages using older versions of Photoshop ...

http://www.fredmiranda.com/SI/
http://www.americaswonderlands.com/digital_photo_interpolation.htm

Roger Clark has a page on upsamping using "Adaptive Richardson-Lucy
Iteration" and feels that works the best ... you can download the fox
image snippet and run your software and see if you get something as
good or better ... when I did this using just Photoshop and my normal
three-step workflow (which includes two sharpening passes) that I use
for printing Roger thought it looked about as good what he gets with
R-L, except instead of taking 90 minutes to run I could do it in 3
minutes ... at any rate if you can beat his example Roger would like to
see it.  This is useful info because it's a standardized image.
http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/image-restoration1/index.html

Note that different methods might give better or worse results
depending on the image (and the operator if sharpening is included).
For example here's a test (by someone selling GF, just as the guy
selling a Stair Interpolation action came up with an image that looks
good upsized using SI) that shows GF is better than Photoshop, at least
for this image ... http://www.inkjetart.com/news/gf/ ... but it's
irrelevant to me because they rasterized a vector image and then ran
the tests and none of my images are vector-like images.  Few photos
are.

Bill

That's interesting, because I have compared the Lanczos filter in Irfanview
and ImageMagick with Photoshop bicubic and bicubic smoother.  In all cases
where upsampling aspect ratio remained 1:1, Lanczos produce sharper/smoother
edges and better detail.  Perhaps bicubic might be better when changing
X and Y axes in different ratios; it is known for that.

Many people have come to the same conclusion.  I had GF 2.0 (bundled
with a scanner) and tested it on several images and felt I could get
better results with Photoshop too, at least at the magnifications I was
using.

Bill

Hi Everyone
Has anyone tried Genuine Fractals plug-in for photoshop? I bought the
3.0LE version a couple of years ago but have never got it to work as
Lizard Tech claim. It is supposed to enlarge up to 600% with virtually
no loss of resolution. When I enlarge an image using Genuine Fractals
the result is no different from the same enlargement using Photoshop's
bicubic re-sampling! I guess I must be doing something wrong but I've
tried many times following the manual instructions as best I can.
Anyone got any ideas where I am going wrong?
Thanks & Regards
Pte