Enlarging Cell Phone Photo and Sharpening for Print
 

Hey gang!

Hope everyone is doing well!

I have a bit of a challenge! A very dear friend of mine sent me an image she captured with her Cell Phone of the baby her friend had. She wants me to blow up the image, sharpen it and retouch the skin. There is no other option for a better source file... this is it!

I told her that because the image is fuzzy and low-res to begin with that the best I could do was probaly 4x6 but she really wants an 8x10.

I have the TLR Sharpening Kit and will try sharpening with that was as well as some other ways. Any ideas on good techniques to sharpen this fuzzy image and then giving it a soft glowing look?

I would also like to know how best to bump this image up to 150 dpi and to the larger print sizes.

The original source file is 640 x 480 72 dpi

What do you think the best course of action is to get this to be an 8x10 print?

Thanks for any input you can give!

There is a program called "Genuine Fractals" that will blow up an image about 500% to 700% without loosing too much quality. A lot of printers use it to up res pictures that need to be printed from smaller files.

There is a line of discussion that says if you keep up-sizing photoshop images about 10% at a time - over and over again - then you can do a couple hundred percent increase.

Ray,

Got your mail and replied. Thanks so much :)

I will check out Genuine Fractals. I see that Extensis has a product called pxl SmartScale and will check that out. Tho I don't really want to spend big bucks on a plug in for one photo. I am trying to find a way to do it with just Photoshop.

I did read about the upsizing 10% at a time, but in my searches here at RP I found this thread where it is advised against doing this becasue it damages low level detail quickly. I can not afford to lose much detail in this image.

Thanks and I look forward to you sending over what you have. I apprecaite it!

welcome home, RNB :)
i worked on your image, but i'm not at home and dont have my normal tools, so i wasnt quite happy with the results. i'll work on it some more when i get home in a few days.

Craig

Hi Craig! :wavey:
Glad to be home :)

Ok I would really appreciate that. I hope you are doing well.

Nat

What If I
 

What if I were to just open the image in PS and then bump the dpi to 150 and the image size to 8x10. Will this cause me to increase the fuzziness of the image?

Ray thanks so much for sending the pics. I bumped the images using PS bicubic interpolation and it was OK. I really want to look into pxl SmartScale and Genuine Fractals for the next time I have to do something like this. Just the price is an issue for me right now.

How did you end up upsizing the ones you sent to me?