How many times you’ve felt that the photos you captured during your visit to a tourist place years back should also have been captured separately from a close distance to get a closer view? Yes, I understand that previously there used to be a limitation as to how many photos you could take from a single camera film. Now with digital cameras around, and with ever-increasing memory capacities, generally you don’t have a limitation on the number of pictures you can capture at a single spot. Yet, even today, there are several occasions when you realize only at a later stage that you should have captured a few closer images of a tourist sot or of a family function. Moreover, there may be several images that you may have acquired from outside sources, including from the Internet, which you want to enlarge for a better and closer view of some specific part of the image(s) or of the whole image(s). However, the problem with enlarging an image is that you lose the quality and sharpness of the image. Most software available today that can enlarge an image or picture, do so at the cost of reduced quality; in fact, sometimes the enlarged image is just a collection of dots or pixels of different colors and the real picture is actually lost completely! While many software will offer you reduction of image size while maintaining good quality, if you want to enlarge the image or increase the resolution of the picture or photo they cannot maintain quality. Of course, there are a few good commercial software that can do it, but then they cost a lot and it is only one of their functions. SmillaEnlarger is a software which can enlarge a picture and increase its resolution without losing much quality or sharpness of the original picture. And, the biggest advantage is – this software is absolutely free and is an open-source software.
Look at the following picture that I had taken sometime back; see how I could enlarge a particular area of the picture using SmillaEnlarger, without losing much of the picture quality. The enlargement was almost 600% (considering the limited portion of the image which I enlarged) and yet the quality of the enlarged picture is almost the same:
Click here to see the full-size image
I must hasten to add that, of course, there is going to be some loss of quality when you enlarge a picture. But, the question is how much? And, moreover, what method or algorithm a particular image-enlarging software uses to enlarge the image? So, it all depends. It is true that you would not get the perfection in quality of an enlarged image; but, if you can get almost the same quality even after about 600% enlargement, then I think we’ve every reason to be satisfied.
SmillaEnlarger has been developed by Mischa Lusteck as an open-source project as a part of SourceForge; and it uses an algorithm developed by him to resize an image that can smoothen and de-noise the original image. It is a small graphical tool to resize, especially magnify bitmaps in high quality.
In fact, SmillaEnlarger’s name is deceptive. Don’t be confused by the word “Enlarger”; it can also condense an image to reduce its size. I found that it could change the magnification of the above image from 1% to 3000% of the original image size!!! Here, from 1% up to 100% would be reduction of picture size, while anything more than 100% is an enlargement in the image size or the resolution of the picture.
The quality of an enlarged image produced by using SmillaEnlarger is almost at the same level that you would expect from a commercial software but which would be quite heavy on your pocket. SmillaEnlarger, on the other hand, is absolutely free.
SmillaEnlarger supports various popular image formats such as JPG, PNG, BMP, PPM, TIFF, GIF. It works on Windows 2000, XP and Vista. Moreover, Smilla Enlarger is a portable software program which won’t require installation and you can easily carry it in your USB pen drive.
It is a very simple utility with a simple interface. Have a look at the following two tool boxes that are available in its main window side by side:
You can select various parameters, including the magnification factor (or zoom), Sharpness, De-noise, Flatness, dithering, FractNoise, etc. You can resize the image either using the magnification factor (or zoom) or by entering your own values for the new width and new height of the resized image which you want to be produced. Moreover, you can also change / move / resize the area or part of the original image as per your choice that you want to enlarge (or reduce) in size / resolution.
SmillaEnlarger displays the original image and the resized image, as it actually appears, in two panes side by side in its main interface. After experimenting with an image using different parameters, once you are satisfied with its enlarged image, its quality, size, portion covered, etc., you can save it on your computer.
SmillaEnlarger can thus enlarge your images without losing much of the picture quality and provide you quite satisfactory bigger pictures.
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I tried this program- it works fine. I find it useful. I have been following Techsuperb site and find it an excellent source of information on tech subject.
Hello there, some body took some pictures from my family and give it to me in a disc but the size of each picture are too small like e-mail resolution (461×726 pix) how can i change to a normal size? i can’t have the original.
thanks and i apreciate your time.
Mercy