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One fascinating aspect of analogue photography is, that by means of an Enlarger, you can pick an interesting part of your photo and blow it up to poster size. Whereas zooming into a digital photo just leads to a bunch of colored blocks. My little tool tries to be an easy-to-use equivalent of the analogue enlarger for the digital photography: You choose an image file, pick a rectangle and decide how big the result should be ( by scaling factor or by giving width or height of the result ), then you press 'Enlarge & Save' and get an enlarged image with smooth curves instead of blocks, where edges in the original stay ( more or less ) unblurred edges in the result.
Usage in detail:
When starting SmillaEnlarger you will see a husky named Smilla in the tabbed view on the right side, and a thumbnail version in the column to the left, together with some buttons and input fields. To replace Smilla and open another input image, grab an image somewhere and drop it onto the enlarger window, or paste something from the clipboard, or open a file using 'Open...' in the file menu. Now you should see your image in the right view and a thumbnail of it on the left. The thumbnail shows a small version of the output image, giving you an impression of its contents and format.
Cropping:
In the right tab, titled 'Cropping', you can select a region of your image for enlarging. When you hold down the mouse within this view and drag it around, you will see that a frame appears, the cropping rectangle. It won't disappear when you release the mouse. You can move it by grabbing its interior or resize it by grabbing the frame. To make it disappear, click anywhere outside the rectangle. The contents of this cropping rectangle are enlarged when you click
'Enlarge&Save'. If no rectangle is defined, the complete input image is enlarged. In the combo box under the picture you can select one of several fixed cropping formats for the rectangle, for example 'square', or '1 : sqrt(2)' ( the format of a normal Din A4 paper ). Use 'free' to allow arbitrary cropping. After clicking 'Center View' the view will center around the selected region. This is useful for fine adjustments if you have marked a very small part of the input.
The new job is pushed into the Job Queue and processed in the background, you can directly continue working with the enlarger. Changes of enlarger settings don't have any influence on existing jobs.The settings of the job ( size, destination, parameters ) are those present at the moment of pressing 'Enlarge & Save', they can not be changed afterwards.
Batch Processing
SmillaEnlarger can automatically process a batch of images with the same settings: If you drop a folder onto the enlarger, the contents are scanned for images of supported type ( subfolders are ignored ). Onto those images the current parameters and the resizing method chosen in the Output Dimensions box are applied at once. The new jobs are moved to the queue automatically, you don't have to press 'Enlarge&Save'. The results are put into a new folder, the name is that of the source with an appended '_e'. Also, when you drop multiple files, those are likewise pushed into the queue automatically, but in this case no new folder is created for the batch results. Important: Before dropping more than one file, check if all settings are as you want, especially look under 'Write Result to:' in which folder the results will be saved ( probably you will want to uncheck 'Use Source Folder' and give a new location where your batch results are saved together ).
To create a symbolic link to the binary, open a terminal window, change to the directory you want to put your link and call ln -s /Path/to/SmillaEnlarger.app/Contents/MacOS/SmillaEnlarger with the appropriate path to your SmillaEnlarger.To prevent lengthy pathtyping, simply write ln -s into the terminal, then go to your SmillaEnlarger icon, option-click onto it and open the application bundle. Go into the subfolder Contents/MacOS/, inside you will find the SmillaEnlarger binary, grab it with the mouse and drop it onto the terminal window, the terminal then w will fill in the full path to the binary. Usage of SmillaEnlarger: SmillaEnlarger [ < sourcename > ] [ -options... ] with options-z <number> / -zoom <number> Set zoom-factor to <number> percent ( integer value ).-o <filename>Write result to file <filename> .-saveto <foldername>Write results into folder <foldername> . O Output Dimensions:-width <sizex> and -height <sizey> set size of resulting image.If both width and height are given, aspect ratio is changed by default. Additionally, if you have set -width AND -height , you can set one of the following options: -fitFit output inside the given rectangle.-fitandbars Fit output inside the given rectangle,fill up with black margins. -cover Cover the given rectangle.-coverandcrop Cover the given rectangle, cut away the overlapping parts. E Enlarge Parameters:-sharp < n >, -flat < n >, -dither < n > -deNoise < n >, -preSharp < n >, -fNoise < n > Set the e enlarge parameters with integer numbers < n > between 0 and 100. -quality <number> Set image quality of the result.-h / -helpPrint this help.-i Start in interactive mode.
Project page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/imageenlarger/
License / Copyright:
Copyright (C) 2009 Mischa Lusteck
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License ( license.rtf ) for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License in license.rtf along with this program; if not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.