This past Thursday, classmates Richard Swenor and Ian Williamson introduced our class to Genuine Fractals. This Photoshop and Light Booth plug-in allows users to interpolate images better than the native software does. It enables users to create larger scale images of higher quality than if they had just used Photoshop or Light Booth because it has a better equation for interpolation as well as more settings to adjust the final image.

The basic settings that can be adjusted when creating a Genuine Fractal image include:

Sharpening: This sharpens how luminous the image is. It should only be edited when the image is being viewed at 100%.

Texture Control: This controls the texture that you can see in the image and how much of it you want to keep. Amount and Threshold are the settings that get changed when adjusting Texture Control. Amount is the amount of texture. Threshold is the amount of hard edges that are maintained in the image.

Film Grain: This helps to make the image look sharper. To change the Film Grain, you must adjust the Threshold. This determines what is considered an edge. For good results, it’s usually good to use between 20 and 30.