Free plug-in for Adobe Photoshop allows anyone to open .stn files created with Genuine Fractals

November 15, 2005—[1] onOne Software today announced a free Genuine Fractals Reader plug-in that allows Photoshop CS and CS2 users to open files saved with Genuine Fractals. The latest version of Genuine Fractals 4.1 is an image scaling plug-in for Adobe Photoshop that uses a patented, fractal-based algorithm to increase the size and resolution of images with a better retention of detail than other scaling methods available in Photoshop.

Any user of Adobe Photoshop CS or CS2 can open and view an image that was scaled using Genuine Fractals and saved with the .STN file extension. The .STN (pronounced “sting”) file format, available only through Genuine Fractals, allows users to significantly reduce the file size of their scaled images without sacrificing image quality.

When increasing the scale of an image for large format printing, the size of a file also increases. Transferring large files can be a problem. The Genuine Fractals .STN file format addresses this problem by saving the file using loss-less Wavelet compression that significantly reduces the size of a file without sacrificing image quality. For example a 617k image scaled 600% may result in a file size of 46.8 MB when saved as a .PSD file. This same file saved using the .STN file format, while retaining all of the image data, is only 15.9 MB. When saved using an even higher level of compression, the final file size is only 2.9 MB, a savings of 94% from the .PSD file.

Download the plug-in for Mac OS X [2] here
Dowlonad the plug-in for Windows XP[3] here.

You can read the full Press Release [4] here.