Life in LoFi: iPhoneography | iPhone Photo News, Showcases, App Reviews

Resize-Photo screenshots

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Resize-Photo
Version 1.1
Price: $0.99

Bottom Line: A great app for enlarging images on your iPhone. Has a few bugs when reducing them for email or MMS.

Resize-Photo by iLegendSoft is a tool to help you change image size on your iPhone. If you subscribe to a keep-it-all-on-your-iPhone line of thought on iPhoneography, Resize-Photo eliminates the need to enlarge your images on a computer using Photoshop. Believe it or not, there’s sometimes a need to reduce the size of your photos, and Resize-Photo does that quickly, but has a few bugs when downsizing images.

Resize-Photo is easy to use. Simply load an image into the app. There are three methods of resizing an image. You can save the image using one of the several preset sizes. You can tap on the pixel values at the top of the screen and enter in new values, either in pixels, percent or points. You can also choose to lock or unlock the aspect ratio, giving you the option of scaling horizontally and vertically with different values. You can also pinch to zoom and enlarge. When cranking my images up to the maximum size, I found this method to be fastest and easiest.

Click to enlarge

The app will resize images up to 3500×3500 pixels. It uses bicubic interpolation which is one of the methods that Photoshop uses to scale images. Interpolation doesn’t recreate data in your photos. It “guesses”. It adds additional pixels where there were none before by inserting between two pixels the average value of the two.

So how does Resize-Photo do? About as good as Photoshop does enlarging to the same pixel dimensions — see the comparison image for results. Compared to my original image, the enlarged photo was surprisingly crisp and the app didn’t seem to introduce any additional noise into the image. Resize-Photo appears to use the common bicubic interpolation algorithm to add pixels, which is a better method of adding pixels. It does a good job of filling in lines and curves without pixelating. It does a better job of making an image bigger than simply viewing the image at a larger percentage. You can see in the comparison shots that the original image enlarged has more artifacts and pixelization around the letters than either the Photoshop or Resize-Photo enhanced versions. (The original image above was a 1600x1200px image shot with an iPhone 2G. The detailed areas shownn to the side were enlarged to 3500px wide.)

Interpolated photos aren’t as sharp as shooting with a higher resolution camera, but sometimes enlarging an image is simply necessary and Resize-Photo creates good results. The larger and better your image is to start with, the better your results with this app are likely to be. Full-res iPhone 4 photos enlarge great with almost no visible loss of detail. You should get good results even from full-size iPhone 2G/3G 2MP images. That said, you won’t get miraculously usable results by trying to enlarge a super-low 320×480 photo. If you stick to enlargements of no more than 200%, you’ll probably be pleased with the results.

If you use your iPhone for photo-journalism, Resize-Photo is a perfect utility that lets you shoot images, resize them, and upload them ready for print all from your iPhone while out in the field.

Another use for Resize-Photo is to quickly reduce the size of your images, which is particularly helpful for sharing photos if you are sending from or sending to a recipient on a slower EDGE network. The app is great for reducing photos to share via MMS. It can perform the task in two steps — open and save. Smaller image sizes reduce the likelihood of your MMS failing, especially if you’re experiencing slow upload times.

The biggest bug I experienced with the app is reducing image sizes by saving with one of the preset sizes. The images saved to my camera roll with larger sizes than I was expecting. 320x480px — a good size for MMS — actually saved at 640x720px, which despite the small file sizes contains considerably more data. Something to watch out for if you use the app to reduce the size of images.

Despite this bug, I love the app. When used in moderation, I don’t mind interpolation. If you use apps like DXP or Pudding Camera, you won’t get true full size images, but you can use Resize-Photo to get images that are larger and that can be used for print. Resize-Photo is a good, easy to use app that allows me to size up or reduce images without touching my Mac. I knocked off a star from my rating because of the issue saving reduced images — it really does lessen the usability of an otherwise excellent app. Otherwise, I’m really happy with the app and I recommend it to anyone who needs the ability to enlarge images on their iPhones without touching Photoshop on their Mac.

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