Re-Sizer: The Biggest Photoshop Plugin Scam

The other day I was going through the Fate Cycle Series image back catalog. There are a ton of drawings from Marc Froment in there, and I had colourized a few myself. Sadly, some of the working copies of the colourized versions were damaged, so I was looking for an image resizer kit to help me get some of the work done faster and produce a better image. I thought I had found it.

I was wrong. I purchased Re-Sizer at http://www.re-sizer.com/ and not only did I find that I had to wait at least 5 days to download the "software" because they use Paypal only, but it took an extra two days on top of that.

When I was allowed to download it I set it up with Photoshop CS2. The instructions and general documentation that came with this "software" were minimalist to the extreme. Anyone who didn't know photoshop very well would have an impossible time understanding what they were supposed to do. I got past that, no problem for me, I've been using photoshop since the fifth version, possibly earlier.

It turned out that this "software" is actually an automation set. That is, it's a script that uses several commands already built into Photoshop to alter a photo so it might look okay after it's resized. You're not buying anything new here, just an automated tool that really can't do any better than you can if you just do a little reading on the best way to resize photos in Photoshop.

Here's an example of what this tool can do using the best conditions. I took a copy of the Re-Sizer logo straight from their website, set the automation to increase it's size by 200%, and let the "magic" happen. Here's the result:







Not terrible, but if I had to use this for publicity documents or any kind of professional work I simply couldn't. The edges are too fuzzy, it looks resized. Here's a quote from their site; "Enhancing photos and images from low to high quality;Enlarging the size of photos up to 600% without loss of quality;" Keep in mind the image above was only resized 200% and if you click on it you'll see the mess it made.

They do say it works best with stock images, but I have news for you; anyone can have really good luck with stock photos. They're made to look good, even the smallest stock photos are offered at a decent starting resolution so you can see what you're getting if you buy the larger version.

In short; don't waste your time or money. Re-Sizer is a pointless money grab of a product that does nothing you can't do yourself, you can even create your own automation to do it better. Avoid this little scam, trust me, these greedy little bastards don't deserve your $10.00.

If you want to save some time while resizing learn a few things from the masters on photoshop forums, they'll have some really good advice there and give you a few short cuts.

RL