BenVista PhotoZoom Classic 7.1

Enlarging your favorite pictures is a simple enough operation that nearly any image editor can do for you in a snap. Enlarging your favorite pictures without losing any of their original quality is a bit harder to achieve. Now, enlarging your favorite pictures and improving their original quality in the process is something that only BenVista PhotoZoom Classic can achieve, thanks to its proprietary S-Spline technology.

This is an image editor and enhancer that anyone can use. Not anyone will be able to make the most of its functionality right away, but with a bit of patience and a quick look at the program’s own tutorials and Help pages every now and then, anyone can enlarge, crop, and improve their favorite pictures with no quality loss whatsoever. The program’s interface is fairly simple, and it comes with a number of presets and resize methods that simplify most of the tasks.

This is not an image editor to add effects and clipart and filters to your images – though I wouldn’t say no to that – but to perform high-quality enlargements, a task that most non-professional and some well-known professional photo editors systematically fail to accomplish. Bilinear, bicubic, and nearest-neighbor interpolation methods are good enough to be used by such landmark software tools such as Photoshop, but they all fall short of the quality that S-Spline and S-Spline XL offers. These enlarging techniques remind me of the AIHT algorithm, an image enlargement technique that – contrary to what most of its competitors do – enhances the picture before enlarging it, producing excellent results. S-Spline not only allows you to produce up to 300000 x 300000 pixel renditions of your best shots, it makes the result look just like – if not better than – the original. By improving the image’s detail, edges, sharpness, intensity, and by removing any previous (compression) artifact, it is no wonder that the resulting picture has nothing to envy of the original one.

The program offers a set of the most common enlarging techniques for you to try and compare with one another, such as Lanczos, Catmull-Rom, Mitchell, Bell, or Hermite. The tool’s split-window capabilities will let you see in pairs and in real time how each of those methods performs their magic. You can fine-tune the result by tweaking a number of parameters to your convenience, and add a boost of detail or contrast here and there. If you like the final results better, you can always save these settings as a new custom profile for you to use in the future.

Comprehensive as it is, you can always improve BenVista PhotoZoom Classic by upgrading to its Pro version. Here the size limits are pushed to 1 million x 1 million pixels, support for HDR images has been added, and the set of enhancing algorithms has been also enlarged to include film grain, photo vividness, and exposure enhancement features. Whichever version you choose, rest assured that the results will astound you. This is not a cheap product, but excellent quality never is.