I'm looking into both Genuine Fractals and Blow Up for image resizing and am wondering if anybody has compared the two head to head. I know that Genuine Fractals is releasing a new version later this spring, but does anybody have any major pros/cons of either program?

I have used Genuine Fractals for quite a long time now, and have always been happy with the results -- it truly does work as advertised (although perhaps within the bounds of reason a bit more than the advertising might suggest).

That said, I have always thought their interface was absolutely horrible, and inexplicably so. That's never been a deal-breaker, mind you, but I'm mentioning it FWIW..

I'm sorry I can't offer any input about Blow Up, I don't have any experience with it.

I own Genuine Fractals 4 and Photozoom Pro 2.1.6, but I've never used blow up. If you haven't considered Photozoom yet, I suggest you try it out. I think they're both quite good, but the geometric artifacting of Genuine Fractals can sometimes be visible depending on how big of an enlargement it is from the original rez. I would say that Photozoom Pro 2 is a notch better, because you can fine tune the process and the results are about as resolved as Genuine Fractals minus the geometric artifacting. It's more a matter of what you prefer, rather trying to find one with a great advantage over the others. However, the fine tuning within Photozoom Pro, and its many different algorhythms (S-Spline, Lanczos, etc...) makes it stand out in my mind.

I updated my GF 4.0 to 4.1 to see the changes, and frankly I prefer 4.0. They really did nothing to improve the results, they just added some slightly more convenient presets and added their plugin to a separate column in the PS menu bar... I think it's bad form- if more plugin companies did that, the Photoshop menu would become unmanageable. I went back to 4.0, and haven't bothered looking at the recent changes (if any).

I've used GF for many years -- basically since it was first introduced, and used it with my scanned images, and later some of my digital images. I tried Blow Up when it was first introduced because Alien Skin has always produced excellent pluggins.

By my comparisons, there weren't many differences and a lot of comparable qualities. The slight differences were Blow Up's ability to add faux grain, if you feel you need it. Personally, I don't. The BIG plus is if you work in layers and want to res-up a layered file. Blow Up allows you to maintain the layers, GF makes you flatten the file. Speed-wise, I don't remember a dramatic difference between the two. Both were pretty slow on 16-bit files, Blow Up was a little faster (if I remember correctly) in 8-bit (without layers). Overall, there wasn't enough of a difference for me to buy Blow Up. Thinking about now, perhaps I'll give it another try. (I also own pxl Smart Scale, so I really don't NEED yet another program, though pxl Smart Scale has a better, full-screen preview, but runs out of memory easily.)

Overall, I don't think you'd go wrong with either. If you're only resizing a little, use PS Bicubic smoother. I use it more these days, because it's far faster, and quality is much better than in previous years.

Nemo

I've also used Genuine Fractals and concur with the other posters: good results, bad but working UI. I wouldn't be too concerned about other people's opinions, as enlarging is largely a subjective issue. Depending on the subject matter you also might get different results with different photos.