Alien Skin’s Blow Up image enlargement software enables photographers to easily create large prints that look great at huge sizes. We recently spoke with Raleigh, NC photographer Simon Griffiths, who uses Blow Up to provide local restaurants, hotels, and other retail spaces with high-quality large prints. He spoke with us about the image enlargement process, how to manage client expectations, and about the potential hazards of creating work that’s good enough to steal.

How long have you been using Blow Up for image enlargement, and why did you begin using it?

I’ve been using Blow Up for 10 years now. I had been using a series of actions prior to using Blow Up that worked okay but were cumbersome and took awhile to process. In Blow Up, having the interface that gives me an idea of what the finished image will look like at 100% is a real plus.

I first started using Blow Up when camera file sizes were maxing out at the 10-12 Megapixal range. My first commercial use was in the enlarging of files of that size up to 6 feet wide. I then took composite images up to as much as 10 feet wide, printed on stretched canvas.

For my show a year and a half ago, I created 12 large fine art prints that were enlarged primarily from 32 megapixel files up to 40 inches in one dimension. The quality of enlargement was outstanding and in many cases looked like the images had been shot on large format film or digital.

I just finished a project for a client that required taking their small JPGs at 72dpi up to 18”x24” at 300dpi. I used Blow Up on all the images and the results were extraordinary.

I did some initial editing in Photoshop to bring out clarity and contrast and improve the look of images that were either old JPGs of prints, or just small digital files. I then imported the images into Blow Up and took them all up to the same size. The grain function of Blow Up allowed me to bring a more historic look to several images, which was the point of the project anyway. The client was ecstatic.

Can you walk us through the image enlargement process with a sample image?

This was originally shot on a Nikon D200, which is a 12 megapixal camera. It was blown up to a layered image that is 1.8Gigs, so it’s six images stitched together. Then I used Blow Up to get it to a 60” wide print at 300dpi.

Even with the increased file size of the Nikon D800, I still use Blow Up when making larger prints, especially when the files I’m provided with aren’t that large to begin with.

A lot of my older work is on film and I can scan it at fairly high resolution using my Imacon scanner, but even then if I need to make a large print, I’ll use Blow Up to get it to the size I need with a DPI that tends to work better with my printer.

What was the learning curve like?

It’s fairly intuitive, so I can’t see that the learning curve is that hard.

If you use Blow Up as part of the Exposure Bundle, where does Blow Up occur in your workflow?

I only use Blow Up on a copy of my final image. Once I have made all my adjustments either with Exposure and Photoshop, I will save the file and then use Blow Up within Photoshop to enlarge the copy to whatever size is required, leaving the original file alone.

When you know you are going to enlarge an image in Blow Up, does it influence how you edit it ?

I don’t use as much sharpening on my original if I know it’s going to be enlarged greatly. I will wait for that step until either during the Blow Up process using the tools within Blow Up, or afterward in Photoshop. I like the fact that I can play with the before/after view to see what the effect will be within Blow Up. I also like to do that in Photoshop using a separate layer, after which I can go back to see which one works better.

What advice can you give photographers wanting to upsell existing clients or find new clients for large prints? How have you found your clients for these?

When asked to possibly make enlargements for clients, I will always photograph the space. Measure it correctly, then give them composite photographs with examples of what the images will look like on the walls to scale. It really helps sell the idea of large works of art. I used perspective, distort, and transform functions within Photoshop to correctly scale the images to the space where the image will hang.

For any photographers who are new to image framing, what considerations should they be aware of? What do you look for when choosing a frame?

Although I’ve offered unframed canvas prints in the past, I frame almost everything now. Unframed canvas has to be absolutely perfect to come across as something better than you can get at Costco. Very few companies can provide a level of canvas wrap that is really clean and professional looking.

If you want clients to pay you a lot of money, then if they look at the materials used on the back of a canvas wrap, it can completely undermine your ability to charge a premium.

All my wraps are custom built with heavy duty bars. The wrapping has to be absolutely perfect and for a long time, I had a guy that was so good at it. His wrapping was a work of art. I either use black edges or create a white border on the face of the wrap. Now because I struggle to get the back of the canvas as clean as I would like, I almost always custom build a floating frame to wrap the image. It looks so much more professional. I prefer to offer framed prints as finished pieces for my clients. It allows them to see my vision in its final form.

Do you use Blow Up exclusively for commercial work to clients, or do you also use it for image enlargement work for family and friends?

I don’t distinguish my work separately, whether it is for me or my clients. I am a BIG believer in personal work. Much of my work is personal. It drives my creativity and as such drives the kind of work I get from clients. If your portfolio is based on the work you did for clients yesterday and last week, then the work you get tomorrow and next week will likely be the same or less creative. If you show work in your portfolio that is creative and personal, then it starts to drive your work that you get tomorrow and next week.

Your Blow Up image enlargement work of ACC basketball players was stolen right off the walls of a hotel. Did the police ever recover these?

No, they didn’t recover the prints that I know of. I’m not sure the hotel even pursued it. The prints are probably sitting in some frat house. Since the hotel bought the work outright, it was insured, so we just redid them.

To see more of Simon’s work, visit his website.

The post Using Blow Up Image Enlargement to Deliver Large Prints to Clients appeared first on Alien Skin Software.

With the gigantic sensors in today’s digital cameras, you’ll often find yourself searching for more hard drive space than you will enlarging photos. But there are times when photo enlarging can come in handy — especially for shots you can’t recreate. Unfortunately, increasing the size of a photo usually means a loss in quality. Blow Up is a great solution to tackle this problem. With Blow Up, your photos stay crystal clear during enlargement. In this article, Raleigh-based wedding and portrait photographer Christopher Nieto shares examples of how Blow Up came to the rescue when shoots didn’t go as planned.

Blow Up Rescued a Wedding Shoot

Before starting to shoot a wedding, I confirm my own gear and the gear with my second shooters to double-check all our camera settings are correct. I always want to capture the largest RAW images possible, so that’s the first thing I verify. Some camera systems have small and medium-sized RAW format options, which are easy to miss. The small size in particular doesn’t record a large enough file to do any cropping and still have a large enough file to print. It’s still RAW format, so it’s understandably easy to mistake as the proper format when you glance at the display window. That’s exactly what happened to my second shooter at this wedding.

The resolution difference between small, medium, and full-sized RAW images.

After the wedding, I returned home late at night and downloaded the cards. I thought something was going wrong with my computer because I wasn’t able to zoom in on some of the images, but I dismissed it thinking I was just tired from the day of shooting. The next morning I realized what happened. It was only my second shooter’s images that weren’t allowing me to zoom in because they shot small-sized RAWs. At that point, there was nothing I could do. I had to edit the event just like I would regularly.

I have been using Blow Up to enlarge photos for wedding albums for a number of years. Parents of the bride and groom often send baby pictures or a snapshot of someone’s grandparents to include in the wedding album. Blow Up always performed well when I used it on low-quality photos, so I knew it could handle it.

After the editing was complete, I ran the smaller photos through Blow Up to match their size with the others in the set. Enlarging a bunch of shots in batches makes the process quick, so it only lengthened my post-processing workflow by a few extra minutes. The software is deceptively easy to use. I simply typed in the size I wanted the photos to be and pressed OK. The best part about using Blow Up is the quality of the resized images — it does a remarkably good job at keeping the images clear. The finals blended perfectly with the rest of the set, even though they’d been enlarged several times over. If I look back over the wedding today, I can’t tell which photos were resized and which ones weren’t.

Click to view full resolution image after it was resized with Blow Up.

…and then Another

A few months later, the same thing happened to me again. This time, the stakes were much higher. A local wedding vendor, who I’ve worked with plenty of times before, asked me to photograph their daughter’s wedding. There was a ton of pressure to perform well for this client. I booked a more experienced second shooter that I’ve worked with for over three years. I trusted that photographer much more, so I didn’t shoot extra to compensate for rookie mistakes. If I couldn’t use any of the images they took, there would have been a massive gap in coverage.

Click to view full resolution image after it was resized with Blow Up.

Once again, they had been shooting using the small RAW format, so the photos they delivered were only a fraction of the size I expected. Blow Up came to the rescue again, and it totally nailed it, like always. The wedding set turned out great! And no one can tell that some of the images were resized.

Click to view full resolution image after it was resized with Blow Up.

Blow Up Helped Rebuild a Client’s History

Not all my clients are celebrating the union of marriage. Later in the same year, I was contacted by a funeral home that had recently burned down. In the original building, there were prints hung on the walls of the owners and of their families from previous generations. The photographs ranged from the 20’s, 30’s, and all the way up to the current day.

Cell phone snap of original prints

The fire would have destroyed those memories, forever. Luckily, they found cell phone snaps of each of the photographs from the funeral home employees. I was able to clean up all the images, merge them, remove flash reflections, rebuild them, and then enlarge them to replace all the ruined prints. That client couldn’t be happier with how the enlargements turned out.

Blow Up greatly increased these small cell phone pics to be large enough to print at the same size as the originals.

I have been very pleased by the quality of the resizing effects since the first time I used Blow Up. It’s like magic. How is it even possible? Aside from the fabulous quality you get, one of the very best things about Blow Up is how easy it is to use. And it only takes seconds. I can process batches of images all at once, and it doesn’t slow me down. The speed of my editing workflow hasn’t changed much at all. It’s the perfect solution for all my image resizing needs. I tell photographers all the time to get Blow Up because eventually they will need it, and there’s nothing else out there that comes close to what it can do.

Thank you, Christopher for telling us about your experiences with Blow Up. You can learn more about him on his website, or follow him socially on Facebook and Instagram.

The post Blow Up Image Enlargement to the Rescue appeared first on Alien Skin Software.

Enrique Coleccion is a talented aerial photographer who meticulously documents the great Pyrenees Mountain range that borders France and Spain. His grand panoramas capture the ruggedness of the mountain peaks and beautifully document scenic landmarks in the terrain. Enrique’s work is a popular choice for installations in hotels, outfitters, restaurants, and observatories where visiting tourists admire it for inspiration and as a reference. His print pieces start at 60x90cm (24×36), but they are often enlarged to cover an entire wall.

One of the most hidden lakes of the Pyrenees is Estaing Lake in Val d’Azun, France. Enrique spent several weeks at this location creating routes for the new Auberge du Lac d’Estaing.

Why He Chose Blow Up

Resizing photos with Photoshop didn’t produce satisfactory results for Enrique. He often had to lower the image quality to 158, 118, or 38 dpi to make an image large enough to fill a wall. Enrique noticed subtle noise appearing in all his enlargements using this method. The larger the enlargement size, the more obvious the noise issues would be. Enrique would then clean up the image with a lengthy retouching process to correct resizing problems. As printers advanced to handle higher resolution photos, the time Enrique spent retouching photos grew longer. When he discovered Blow Up, it immediately changed the way he worked, which eliminated the need to retouch his photos after enlargement.

Restaurant La Ceramica in Barbastro, Spain. The inhabitants of Barbastro are great admirers of the highest peak of the Pyrenees, the Aneto, 11,167 feet. The original photo was 12 X 18 inches, but Enrique enlarged it with BlowUp to 104 x 167 inches, and the image maintained good quality.

Excellent Resizing Quality

Blow Up’s excellent photo resizing quality helps make Enrique’s massive installations possible. It’s capable of increasing the size of a photo several times over without sacrificing image quality. In 2018, Enrique produced his largest print, a massive 23-foot long photograph for the cyclist and mountaineering tourist destination in Argelès-Gazost, France, The Tourmalet Experience. It documents several ascending cycling routes of Enrique’s design, which connect to the legendary cols of the Tour de France.

Enrique scaled the slopes of Col de Tourmalet at 2:00 am with his headlamp, ice-ax, crampons, tripod, and camera to capture this impressive scene. The original image was formed by stitching four photos together before being enlarged more than six times with Blow Up.

Enrique has put Blow Up’s resizing technology to the test with the massive enlargements he creates. He has enlarged his photos up to 686% and had good results. He happily touts that the print he resized at that amount retained its quality and sharpness. Enrique says, “If a photo has good resolution and clarity, you can easily enlarge it with Blow Up to an incredible size.”

Casa Moliné in the Barrabés Valley is a Pyrenean style boutique hotel with photo walls at the heads of its beds. Pictured here are the Crabioules Circus, the Benasque Valley, and Aneto, the highest mountain in the Pyrenees. The panorama was originally 32 inches and was enlarged by 475% with Blow Up to nearly 13 feet.

Simplified Workflow

After completing initial tests using Blow Up, Enrique was confident it was the image resizing solution he needed. The pictures he resized with Blow Up didn’t need additional retouching, which simplified his photo resizing workflow. Now, his final image prep only takes him a minute. With Blow Up, Enrique is always confident his enlarged images will look great, and they won’t need any retouching clean-up.

Hut of Montgarri, in Val d’Aran, Spain. Due to its location, it is the only place in the Aran Valley where dog sledding trips are offered in winter along with snowshoeing, skis, and snowmobiles. Inside the refuge are large prints hung in several rooms, the largest of them was resized over 600% with Blow Up.

Enrique’s inspiring larger-than-life-sized panoramas have been made possible by Blow Up’s crystal clear image enlargement technology. His workflow for creating massive prints has greatly improved since he started using Blow Up. He now produces higher quality prints more quickly because he can forgo the final noise-removing retouching steps that he previously had to do during the enlarging process in Photoshop. Enrique’s huge panoramas have inspired countless visitors and tourists with the same passion he has for the Pyrenees. “In many cases, enlarging photos with Blow Up is often nothing short of a miracle,” he says.

Learn more about Enrique and see more of his photos by visiting the Routes of the Pyrenees created by Colección EGF on his Wikiloc page. It documents outdoor trails for cycling, hiking, and other activities and is a place of inspiration for photographers.

The post Creating Wall-Sized Prints with Blow Up appeared first on Alien Skin Software.

Blow Up is a great piece of software for making crystal clear enlargements. It handles the crucial last step of processing large prints. When resizing your best work for a massive canvas above your fireplace, quality is paramount. That’s where Blow Up shines.

We’ve heard some really cool stories from Blow Up users over the years. This article points out a few of the fun Blow Up uses we’ve featured.

Illustrations at Enormous Sizes

Brian Edward Miller is a digital illustrator from Colorado. The first time he saw Blow Up’s rendering quality it became the obvious choice for his resizing needs. Now Blow Up is integrated into the process of creating his beautiful artwork. When making these huge, detailed illustrations Brian can use a smaller canvas, so he doesn’t deal with computer lag when working on the file. In this article, he created a semi trailer wrap using Blow Up for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Image Enlargement to the Rescue

Wedding and portrait photographer Christopher Nieto shares stories about how Blow Up rescued him from a few tight situations in this article. Blow Up helped him make up the resolution difference between small and full-sized RAW images for complete coverage of a wedding. Christopher also used Blow Up on old small cell phone photos to reproduce family heirlooms lost in a fire.

Wall-sized Prints

Enrique Colección makes inspiring larger-than-life-sized panorama images. Resizing with Photoshop didn’t produce satisfactory results. Enrique would need to painstakingly remove enlarging artifacts from his images before sending them to the printer. The larger the installation, the more time he needed to fix them. In this article, he talks about how Blow up saves him tons of time and helps his gigantic prints always look great.

High-quality Wall Art

Raleigh, NC photographer Simon Griffiths uses Blow Up to provide local businesses with great-looking large prints. He shared a little bit about his image enlargement process and how Blow Up helps him meet and exceed his client’s expectations. In fact, Blow Up has even helped him create work that’s good enough to steal. Learn more in this article.

Where is Blow Up?

The best way to run Blow Up is through Exposure. You can simply right-click on a photo and choose Blow Up from the ‘Edit in,’ or ‘Edit Copy in’ menus. Creating a copy of the image first before resizing ensures the original image is untouched. Blow Up also integrates easily with Photoshop and Lightroom.

Blow Up is a great way to enlarge your images. It will keep images crystal clear for enormous panoramas, gigantic portraits, or expansive illustrations. Whatever your needs are for enlarging images, we recommend Blow Up.

The post Photo Enlargement with Blow Up appeared first on Exposure Software.

We’ve updated all our products to support M1 Mac computers. Exposure X6 supported the new Apple Silicon computers back in December, but now all our software does!

The Exposure Bundle supports Apple Silicon Macs. That includes Exposure, our creative photo editor and organizer, Snap Art, for creating beautiful art that looks painted by hand, and Blow Up, for making crystal clear enlargements at enormous sizes. The list of Apple Silicon Mac supported products also includes our graphic design application Eye Candy, which creates great-looking graphics like chrome, glass, and fire in an easy-to-use interface.

You can update your software right now on our website. Or, if you haven’t used our software before, you can try it free for 30 days by downloading the trial.

Quickly adding support for the latest platforms is another way our team shows our commitment to making the best software money can buy. Frequently that means we are continually making adjustments behind-the-scenes to squeeze more performance out of computing systems on the cutting-edge.

The post Apple M1 Support Available appeared first on Exposure Software.

The Exposure Bundle integrates all three of our photography software titles into one. Exposure is the centerpiece, where you organize and edit images. Snap Art enables you to apply painterly effects like oil paint and watercolor. And Blow Up enables you to enlarge images to enormous sizes with Blow Up’s crystal clear image enlargement technology. We made this video to show how you can use the Exposure Bundle to create beautiful art.

Watch the video if you’re new to using the Exposure Bundle. It teaches you the basic principles of processing images such as how to copy images from a camera card, filter out the best shots, and apply editing adjustments in Exposure. You will also see how to open an image in Snap Art and give it a painterly look, and how you can resize and sharpen images efficiently with Blow Up.

The post Getting Started with the Exposure Bundle appeared first on Exposure Software.

Blow Up enables you to enlarge images to enormous sizes with crystal clear quality. It makes it easy to make photos big enough to print on a semi truck or a billboard. We made this video to show you how to use Blow Up.

Watch the tutorial and learn how to get started with Blow Up. You’ll see the end-to-end workflow, including how to open images from Exposure, enlarge to standard paper sizes, and apply sharpening so it looks just like the original shot. We also show how to add grain, and apply corrective sharpening for diffusion as the print ink dries on paper.

The post Getting Started with Blow Up appeared first on Exposure Software.

Blow Up makes it simple to enlarge images with crystal clear quality. There are a number of different approaches you could take in a cropping or resizing job. Blow Up has several resizing modes to make each scenario a breeze.

Watch the video and learn how to use each of Blow Up’s resizing modes. We show how to crop and resize the image in a single step, resize without cropping or changing proportions, and how to stretch the image to fill the page. We also share suggestions for when to use each mode.

The post Blow Up Modes appeared first on Exposure Software.