One of the few refugees left behind during the switch from an IBM G5 to Intel Xeon powered Mac was a little Photoshop plug-in named pxl SmartScale. When we tried to run it, the dialogue boxes were messed-up and Photoshop crashed trying to enlarge an image with SmartScale. That is, until we worked out a little wrinkle to get it running on Intel.

SmartScale is invaluable because it scales images by a far greater degree than either Genuine Fractals, SmartScale’s rival in digital enlargement, or by using Photoshop’s built-in bicubic interpolation. They introduce too many artefacts, halos and jagged edges as the degree of enlargement increases. Whereas SmartScale has extra tools to control sharpening and edge smoothing so that images can be increased up to 1000% and stay usable. It’s also a lot faster than Genuine Fractals.

Better still, SmartScale works in the image’s colour mode rather than converting them to RGB on the fly. Our version of Genuine Fractals, 4.1, does this before resizing, then converts back afterwards. We’ve never noticed any colour shifts during the conversions but they take time to achieve, especially on larger photographs. Finally, the best feature of SmartScale is that it also increases the size of any paths inside the image where as Genuine Fractals leaves paths at original size. Clipping paths inside images enlarged in Genuine Fractal have to be remade.

How to do the dirty deed
We found how to get SmartScale Intelicised by accident. Both SmartScale and Genuine Fractals’ most recent publisher has been onOne Software. SmartScale was originally an Extensis product who sold it and Genuine Fractals (originally LizardTech’s) to onOne in 2005. OnOne has stopped supporting SmartScale in favour of Genuine Fractals 5, a $300 plug-in. We downloaded the demo version.

Peek inside Genuine Fractal 5’s pkg file by holding down Control and clicking on ‘Show Package Contents’. Then delve into the Contents/Resources folder where there are two versions of the onOne Library, one for PPC and one presumably for Intel. We copied the second into the Photoshop plug-ins folder replacing the existing version still there, and fired up Photoshop again.

SmartScale now runs without a glitch, as does Genuine Fractals which also seems to be perhaps, slightly speedier than when using the old PPC library.