Vol. II, Issue 11

• Kneson
• Kneson Progressive
• Kneson Progressive++

All of these enlargement engines are effective on their own. As mentioned in our resample methods newsletter (click here) - you should use all enlargement engines depending on the image content. Smaller images either in size or in resolution can actually benefit from being enlarged with one of the lower engines. Do not be afraid to experiment. You will also find 3 lesser "enlargement engines" (if you can call them that) in the drop-down box of Resample Methods listed as:

• Normal
• Bilinear
• Bicubic

These methods are actually quite simple enlargement algorithms developed over two decades ago, and are still the only ones offered in the highest-end photo manipulation software products like Adobe Photoshop® and Paint Shop Pro®. While these products are excellent in what they do for digital images, they still have not improved how they enlarge photos. The best enlargement algorithm they can provide is Bicubic enlargement as we discussed on our sister website, Photoenlargement.org. Kneson Software recognized this shortcoming as far back as 1994 when we began development on the Imagener line of enlargement technologies.

The "Kneson," "Kneson Progressive," and "Kneson Progressive++" enlargement engines represent a vast improvement in the intelligence used to zoom in on digital images. All of these enlargement engines analyze pixels well removed from each targeted pixel, then estimate how colors change based on the overall patterns of the particular image. This fills in areas with pixels and colors based on much more image information than current enlargement methods, and enlarges photos to allow identification of image content that was not possible before because more of the image information is maintained in the enlargement.

Imagener's Unlimited technology is vastly different in the way it performs enlargements. Instead of a single intelligent algorithm (part of a program) that goes beyond the old Bicubic and Bilinear enlargement methods, the Kneson Unlimited enlargement engine puts images through three separate stages of analysis and manipulation:

1. The engine analyzes image complexity down to the pixel level and saves a pixel map of this information;
   
   
2. Then, the engine computes a vector map of each region using the information in step one, converts the image into vectors and performs the prescribed enlargement based on the enlargement input from the user;
   
   
3. Finally the Kneson Unlimited engine converts the regions back into their original pixel-based format after enlargement.

This process allows images can be resized without limit regardless of their complexity. Furthermore, our testing with older images has shown that some images can be restored without any enlargement at all -- this process actually can improve the quality of images just by putting the images through it.