Until this week­end, I never really had much use for onOne Soft­ware Per­fect Resize 7. The images I cap­ture with my DSLR are large enough for my print­ing needs, so it’s soft­ware that sat rel­a­tively unused on my com­puter. That changed last weekend.

I had lunch with my fam­ily, which is some­thing fairly rare to get us all together at the same time. Maybe that’s why my mother decided to sur­prise my brother and me with an old photo she found when we were very young. It’s just a small wal­let photo, only about two inches tall.

That’s my brother Don on the left with the big smile — same one he has today. I’m the younger, good look­ing kid in the plaid shirt. I can’t tell you how much this lit­tle photo meant to me as old emo­tions came back. That lit­tle pic­ture shows just how much my big brother means to me.

I didn’t want to lose this pic­ture, so the first thing that came to mind was to scan it. My friend Kevin pro­vided me with a scan­ner on an extended loan a while ago, so I put this lit­tle wal­let photo on there and here’s what I got as a result.

That’s the full size from the scan — 597×477 pix­els. That’s good enough for use as an avatar, but I started won­der­ing what else I could do with this old photo. That’s when I decided to explore onOne Soft­ware Per­fect Resize 7.

onOne Soft­ware Per­fect Resize 7 in Action

I was slightly con­cerned that I needed to learn a new soft­ware pro­gram to get the results I wanted. That was silly. It couldn’t have been eas­ier to enlarge this photo with great results. In fact, I felt it was absurdly sim­ple. onOne should make it a bit harder so you have more of a sense of per­sonal accom­plish­ment. Enlarg­ing the photo was about as hard as get­ting $20 out of an ATM.

There was no need to load Aper­ture or Pho­to­shop, since Per­fect Photo Suite is now a stand-​alone appli­ca­tion. I launched the suite and selected Resize from the upper-​right menu of applications.

Once I could see my image, I went to the Doc­u­ment Size panel on the right side. As you can see, I just tra­versed the menu options to select the 11×14 size under the Pho­to­graphic menu option. I didn’t want to push my luck going with a larger size. After all, how much would the image degrade after being enlarged so much?

I clicked the Apply but­ton. The screen blinked for half a sec­ond and the job was done. That was pretty damn fast! The only thing left to do was click the Save but­ton and give it a name and a file format.

Here are your Save Options.

I ended up sav­ing the photo was a PSD file. Not that I needed it in that for­mat, but I wasn’t think­ing about all of the other pro­cess­ing I could do with Per­fect Photo Suite 7 at the moment. My mind was just focused on enlarg­ing the image.

Turns out that my con­cerns about degra­da­tion were unnec­es­sary. In fact, my mother thought the enlarged image looked much bet­ter than the original.

I thought the scan was a bit flat, so I took the larger photo back into Per­fect B&W to tweak it a bit.

You can click on the image to see a larger size, but the result is prob­a­bly larger than will fit on your screen. This is now a 3152×4140 image. That gives plenty of space to go in and do more photo restora­tion — some­thing else I’ll have to try.

Com­pared to mod­ern cam­eras with out­stand­ing sharp­ness, this image may not hold up well tech­ni­cally. When you con­sider that Per­fect Resize 7 gave me such a large image from a worn out wal­let photo that’s over 40 years old, I’d say it’s astound­ing tech­nol­ogy. None of that com­pares to the emo­tional impact of pre­serv­ing a mem­ory. All the imper­fec­tions in the photo fade away and what’s left is a brother’s love. Now that’s a great thing.