Altamira has released version 2.0 of its award winning Genuine Fractals plug-in for Photoshop. Genuine Fractals uses wavelet compression and fractal mathematics to solve two nagging problems for photographers: Transmitting or storing hi-res photos efficiently and still being able to repurpose those mages for different media.

First, from within your favorite image-processing program, Genuine Fractals lets you dramatically compress multi-megabyte images. You can choose exactly how much detail you want to keep from 100% (lossless) to extremely little. But, Altamira says you can safely compress most images to a 1/5th of their original, uncompressed size without visual loss and in many cases 10:1 compression is more than acceptable.

This drastic size reduction would be a boon to field photographers who could then store more and/or higher resolution images while still saving time uploading those images to the home office.

But, compression isn't Altamira's whole story because their image decompression process (i.e. rendering) has one, very special talent: it can actually add synthetic details to scaled-up images. This means that the "money-shot" you got on your 3-megapixel camera could be blown up to poster-sized without looking like a ceramic-tile mosaic.

So, if you are serious about your digital photographs but seriously hate their bulk, you should check out Genuine Fractals 2.0, a tool that dares to declare both "high compression" and "image enhancement" as its strengths.

Copyright © 2006 Stephen Jones All rights reserved.