SmillaEnlarger is a FREE program that lets you enlarge photos that are too small or parts of larger photos while retaining their original quaility. Such programs are hard to find, and if you do find them, they are usually not free. SmillaEnlarger is open source, which means you can just download it and have your fun with it.

SmillaEnlarger is especially handy when you want to enlarge a portion of the photo so you can recognize faces, or perhaps a number plate on a car, or simply a favorite picture of your partner. The program uses special filters which fill the gaps in the image when it is magnified. This way the photo doesn’t look all fuzzy when you make it bigger.

The program’s interface is easy to use, it supports drag and drop feature and batch processing and it lets you control the zoom area and percentage. All you have to do is adjust the frame size and place it on the image that you want to enlarge. Then simply select the zoom percentage.

SmillaEnlarger is portable, which makes it fast and lightweight. It also lets you control the usual properties such as Sharpness, Flatness, PreSharpen, Dithering, DeNise and FractNoise.

This is a powerful tool that gives you exactly what you need, quickly and easily, and it doesn’t cost anything. There are probably programs that are better, but they cannot beat SmillaEnlarger in the value for money department.

I found this tool through Freewaremission and you can download it here.