Printing & Copying

Way back at the very end of June, I was contacted by Chris Bradley-Kidd of Fixerlabs.com, asking if I'd tried their product SizeFixer for upsizing. Apparently his attention had been attracted by my article on the myths of upsizing. He offered to send me a free copy of SizeFixer if I was interested in reviewing their product. After nailing down a few details, I agreed to do a review of SizeFixer.

Now, this all was happening just as I was switching from Windows to the Mac. I ordered a copy of SizeFixer XL for the Mac, and it arrived in the middle of July, just as I was in the thick of several things all at once. SizeFixer was on the stack of things to do, but other stuff kept burying it.

This past weekend, during a brief slow period, I installed the software and started playing with it. I only had a few hours, and this was a problem because the software is slow. Now, I'm not talking 'resizing an image takes a couple of minutes' slow, I'm talking 'resizing a full frame image from the EOS-5d with the quality cranked all the way to the max takes 5.5 hours' slow.

I had some problems, and I've fired off a set of questions to FixerLabs. Hopefully I'll get answers quickly and I and proceed with more testing. The results I got this past weekend were simultaneously encouraging and disappointing. They're encouraging in that if I could get the speed problems ironed out, and figure out exactly what all the controls do so that I could eliminate some unpleasant artifacts, the results would be pretty impressive. Discouraging in that the documentation seems to be on the sketchy side, the artifacts are pretty ugly, and the software is so slow that it's not exactly easy to figure things out just by experimenting.

More news as things develop, as it were.