Switch to full style
Discuss photography techniques, equipment, etc. here.
Post a reply

Need help to enlarge photos

Thu May 01, 2014 1:01 pm

I am not sure if it can be done or not. I have a cousin who lives in Zimbabwe and does not have good internet use, but I asked her for some photos and she sent them but they are very small and when I try to enlarge them the go all funny - you can see the pixels etc. Is there a way to enlarge them without this happening or am I out of luck.

Penny

Re: Need help to enlarge photos

Thu May 01, 2014 1:27 pm

Mostly out of luck. There are some utilities that will up-size the images by creating pixels between the ones there now (Genuine Fractals was one that got good reviews in the past) even Photoshop etc. can "resample" the image, however, you are asking it to sort of make it look better, but you can't re-create detail that was lost in the downsizing. The best solution would be for her to resend the images with at least 1024 pixels in the long direction - those are still relatively small files (100k - 150k or so) but will look much better. Otherwise, you are playing politician and inventing pixels to fill in the image :D I should mention that several things affect the size of a jpg file besides the dimensions - the amount of detail in the image as well as the level of compression can make a big difference (a jpg of a blob against a solid background will be MUCH smaller than the same dimension jpg of a tree with lots of leaves etc.) I use the free Irfanview utility to batch resize (down) my images to my "email" directory - one of the options which can make the images smaller for the same detail is to select the option to remove the EXIF data from the image (that is a header on the image that contains all the information about what camera, shutter speed, ISO, F-stop etc. is contained).

mikey

Re: Need help to enlarge photos

Thu May 01, 2014 2:13 pm

Thanks Mikey, I will see if she can resend or not. Living where she does makes sending photo's very hard, I can't even send her stuff. So I do DVD's for them and hope they arrive safely.

Penny

Re: Need help to enlarge photos

Thu May 01, 2014 6:04 pm

A few years ago I read an article about enlarging small photos in Photoshop.

The essence of the article was you should enlarge the photo in 10% increments rather than all at once. That gives the algorithm a better chance of interpreting the missing pixels.

I never tried it but it might be worth a little bit of your time to see if it helps improve the quality.

Joe

Re: Need help to enlarge photos

Thu May 01, 2014 6:40 pm

Thanks Joe I will do just that as time is the one thing I have plenty of :)

Penny

Re: Need help to enlarge photos

Mon May 05, 2014 7:55 pm

Penny,
The suggestion that Joe gave is a good one. It was so good that Adobe has incorporated it into the resizing algorithm since CS2. If you are using one of the newer versions of the program you are likely not see much improvement. Mikey's suggestion of Genuine fractals is probably your best bet. Here is a link to their consumer version using Genuine Fractals under the hood. http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/resize8/

Regards,
-Vernon

Re: Need help to enlarge photos

Mon May 05, 2014 8:19 pm

Thanks Vernon, I will look into that as well.

Penny

Re: Need help to enlarge photos

Tue May 06, 2014 7:09 am

Don't expect Resize to do a heck of a lot for you. Yes, you can enlarge photos but when you start with images that are basically of poor quality to begin with, you're going to end up with large photos that are of poor quality. The improvement is minimal, if any. So, as Mikey said, you're basically out of luck unless you can get images of better quality. Resizing small photos that have some decent appearance when small are going to go softer as you increase their size ... Resize is not going to keep the relative sharpness you'll want. Resize is not a panacea ... but it is useful. I don't think it's going to be what you need or want ...

Dale

Re: Need help to enlarge photos

Tue May 06, 2014 10:23 am

Thanks Dale, I have discovered that I am not going to be able to enlarge the photos as they are just too small. She is goign to send me another lot a little larger so that should cure the problem.

Penny

Re: Need help to enlarge photos

Wed Jun 18, 2014 8:46 am

Photoshop is pretty good at enlarging, even up to 4X.
Obviously, depends on the original.

Re: Need help to enlarge photos

Wed Jun 18, 2014 11:11 am

Thanks Merlin, I have managed to sort the problem now and it looks a lot better.
Penny
Post a reply