Review: FixerLabs software

• Article 3 of 3
• Irish Printer, July 2007
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 3.1MB

One of the biggest revolutions in the production process in recent years has been the introduction of digital cameras. Images will now arrive in a design studio or newspaper production department via the Internet, on the camera itself on a removable memory card or via a USB connection or some other electronic method that dispenses with the need for a scanner in the vast majority of occasions.

But digital cameras are not perfect and neither are the troops of amateurs and people inexperienced in the exacting requirements of production. All it takes is someone trying to be helpful by using the “Send via email” function on their photo download software for it to turn up at web instead of print resolution. A cheap lens is a cheap lens on any camera and a blur is a blur is a blur.

Fixer Labs has tried to meet this new generation of problems with a fleet of programs, some more helpful than others. Firstly, anyone who’s worked in production for even a small amount of time knows the golden rule of images: never blow up a picture so that its resolution drops below an acceptable level – usually something shy of 300dpi. While you can do it, using Photoshop’s interpolation feature to add in the pixels necessary to fill the gaps and Unsharp Mask and other filters to counteract some of the side-effects, invariably the picture becomes fuzzier or jagged as the picture gets blown up further and further in size.

So the Fixer Labs program that will be of most interest to the majority of designers and production workers is SizeFixer, available in two versions: SizeFixer SLR and SizeFixer XL. The former claims to be able to blow up any digital image to 68 mega pixels, which is equivalent to A1 at 300dpi; the latter can enlarge digital photos to any size without loss of sharpness. The two programs do this using an enhanced algorithm, LensFIT, that models the lens and sensors of the camera that took the picture being worked on. It gets this information from the EXIF data contained in TIFF and JPG files produced by digital cameras. Here comes the first, important caveat: you cannot use any of the SizeFixer programs on an image that does not contain EXIF metadata or that was taken by an unsupported camera and expect it to produce great results. Certainly, in our tests with images wiped clean of any EXIF information or generated by scanners and design applications, we got results that were no better than Photoshop’s interpolation feature.

The SizeFixer programs are standalone applications available for both Windows and OS X. At the moment, the OS X application is PowerPC-native and will not run at full speed on Intel-based Macintoshes; Fixer Labs says a “Universal Binary” version is on the way. Based around a “control panel” metaphor, SizeFixer lets you open any RGB TIFF or JPEG images you want to upsize. The main pane of the control panel lets you decide the final resolution of your image, with a handy set of presets offering you A4, A3, all the way up to A1, and other fields for being more exact in your output requirements. You can also crop the image at this stage so that only the relevant part of the image gets upsized. If you choose to process the image now, it will work almost identically to the Photoshop Image Size function in terms of both speed and quality of output.

But you can also switch to the Super Resolution tab to activate the super resolution feature if you are processing an image with EXIF information. Here you can specify the camera used to take the photo (assuming SizeFixer can’t work it out for itself), the parameters for the upsizing (familiar to anyone used to Photoshop’s Unsharp Mask function) and how much time the program should spend upsizing the image. This is an important consideration: unlike Photoshop’s image resizing function, SizeFixer is very slow with the super resolution function turned on. On an 867MHz PowerPC G4 with 640MB of RAM and OS X 10.4, SizeFixer XL took two hours at its fastest setting to upscale an image 3.5 times its original size. Fortunately, a preview function lets you see what the end result of the operation will be on a selected part of the picture, giving you at least some hope it’ll all be worth it. Two other functions, Unsharp Mask and edge enhancement, are available but typically you should only use these when you can’t use the super resolution function, since they will produce inferior results.

With this kind of overhead, it’s a shame the program doesn’t also include some kind of batch processing or distributed computing capability – few designers will want to turn over their Mac or PC for a few hours during the day, just to improve the resolution of a picture, but would be more than willing for their studio’s computers to work together overnight on a set of images.

Nevertheless, quality can’t be argued with. The ‘fastest’ setting produced an image that was marginally better than Photoshop’s, while “very good quality” produced an enhanced image that was indeed extremely high quality, showing none of the artefacts expected in an over-blown image and more than justified the time invested in the procedure. If you frequently find yourself needing to blow up pictures beyond their natural limits and can find the spare time and computing power necessary, SizeFixer is certainly a worthwhile investment.

It’s worth also mentioning Fixer Labs’ FixerBundle set of plug-ins that work with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro and other compatible editing suites (again, Mac users will find these are PowerPC only). The plug-ins include FocusFixer, which removes blur and softness or brings backgrounds back into focus; NoiseFixer, which removes noise from low quality images or those shot at a high ISO; ShadowFixer, which improves the overall brightness and contrast of images that have areas either over- or under-exposed; and TrueBlur, which creates a more authentic blur. Again, they are based on Fixer Labs’ LensFIT technology so all do what they say on the tin, but have high overheads in terms of time and processing power – although not as great as SizeFixer’s - and need a compatible camera to have taken the shot for good results. Free trials are available for all of them, so you should be able to experiment with them to see if they fit your needs.