Conquer Image Resizing Without All the Math

Review by Fernando Santos

When people think about photo resize, usually it’s because they want a large print, and all they have is a low-resolution image. Here’s a sad story to give you some context: 14 years ago, I took a photo of my dad that everyone in the family still loves to this day. I backed up the photo to my server, uploaded it to an online print service but, before the backup existed on another device, my server hard drive crashed. I lost that RAW file, and all I was left with were the small-sized prints I had ordered, and a low-resolution thumbnail that I managed to download from the online service. Over the years, I always wanted to recover that image. Could I have a better reason to try ON1 Resize AI 2022? 

I’ve used ON1 products long enough to know that they produce quality software, so I wasn’t worried about installing something on my computer that I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep. Installation went fast and easy, detecting Lightroom Classic and Photoshop on my system and automatically configuring Resize AI 2022 to run both as a standalone program as well as a plug-in. The first image I tried had to be my dad’s recovered portrait, or shall I say, recovered small thumbnail: an 800×533-pixel or, if you prefer, a 0.42 Mb image! I know, it is indeed very small even for posting on social media. 

Believe it or not, Resize AI 2022 did a very good job upsizing that image. I tried the four available algorithms: Bicubic, Resize AI 2022 Standard, Resize AI 2022 Faithful, and Genuine Fractals. The latter two were my favorites for that specific photo. The image resized to 4K resolution (3840×2160) looked even sharper. Then, for a different test, I exported a 24-megapixel photo to a small 800×1000-pixel file (less than 1 megapixel), and upsizing it to 6000×9000 pixels produced amazing results. This time my favorite algorithms were Resize AI 2022 Standard and Genuine Fractals. My advice is to try all four until you’re quite confident that you know which algorithm will work best for your image. 

Upsizing is an important feature, but the product isn’t called Upsize AI, right? It’s called Resize AI, and there’s a very good reason for that. As a KelbyOne Community Leader, I see the same questions asked all the time about resizing to print: “I want to print a 5×10″; I want to print a 20×30″; I want to export to social media, etc.” The fact is that many people don’t know how to crop to the correct aspect ratio, or how to resize to the dimensions they need. ON1 Resize AI can help with that, because the software not only has many presets for sending images to printers (Epson, Canon, and HP), but also to video and online print labs. You just need to pick the corresponding preset, and you’ll be given a crop frame (if you’re going for a different aspect ratio) so that you can adjust for the best possible result. Even though you can use Resize AI 2022 with imperial and metric units, the presets are just in imperial units, but that’s something you can easily convert, if needed. 

Resize AI has two more interesting features: gallery wrap and a tile option. The gallery wrap increases your image canvas size to accommodate for a frame wrap. You have a few different algorithms available, so that you can pick the one that works best for your image. The tile option allows you to print your image across several pages, so that you can print much larger than the largest paper size your printer can handle. You can even input how big you want the overlap gap so that you can easily stitch the pages together. This option creates several separate files, each corresponding to a tile, which means it can be used to create those “swipe panoramas” for Instagram that many people would like to know how to do.

Overall, ON1 Resize AI is a good product with a solid set of features that you may want to have in your bag
of tricks. ■