Help to enlarge picture with minimal loss

[magpie2000k]

Hi I have cs2 and paintshop pro.

I need to enlarge an older picture of mine for printing.

I have read elsewhere on this forum a way of doing this by 110% rule however the last entry on this was in 2003 so I guess life has moved on.

Yes I am a newb and realy need your help and assistance.

I feel sure there are ways now to do this with minimal loss but I have tried and tried but with limited result..

Any help would be great but remember I am thick newb so try and make it simple for me If you can

[Swampy]

Magpie, I guess you have discovered the problems with enlarging an image. There's seldom a problem going the other way, but it's a matter of what is happening in the background. When you reduce a picture, you are basically tossing out pixel information and that's pretty easy to do. On the other hand, when you enlarge your application has to guess at what pixels to add to create a smooth image and because it is having to create pixel information where none existed before.

I too have had some success with the 10% at a time method, but it can be very dedious even with a good image being inlarged a great deal. Good results rely so much depends on the size and resolution to begin with. I just make it a practice to shoot everything at my camera's highest resolution (3gig memory cards are cheap these days) and scan everything at 300 DPI and then archive the originals for future use and NEVER resave over them. (I may pull a file from a CD or Folder on my hard drive, but the first thing I do is save it to the desktop with a new name so I never overwrite the original.)

All that being said, there are some commercial programs that do a good job of enlarging. I use Genuine Fractals from OnOne Software (Macintosh). I've taken a 2x3 inch PDF and enlarged it proportionally to 16 inches wide for 4 color printing on a poster and it came out perfect. You can google for "photoenlargement software" to find other options.

[Cupcake]

Yes, Genuine Fractals works great.

[cardmnal]

Perfect timing for this one.

I am considering purchasing software to serve this very purpose. I have pretty much narrowed it down to genuine fractals or alien skin blow up. So I will be looking forward to others input on this thread and hopefully these apps (or others).



Alan

[mistermonday]

Magpie, welcome to RP!
Perhaps you can clarify whether you want to enlarge from an existing paper photo or only from an electronic file? If it is from an existing print, you just need to scan it at a resolution which is 300 ppi X the dimensions of the final enlarged print size you would like to achieve. If you want to enlarge the size from an electronic file, then you can use Photoshop or a 3rd party plugin like Genuine Fractals. With CS2 and beyond, you really do not need to use the 10% rule because when you bring up the Image Size dialog box (Ctrl+Alt+I), you now have 3 options. If you choose Bicubic Smoother, PS will do a very good job of enlarging the image in a single step. Now the DISCLAIMER: Garbage in = Garbage Out. You need to have >500,000 pixels of original image data in order to have your enlargement look good. If your orig file is pixellated and / or has little or poor image data, the resulting enlargement will look awful. Neither PS, nor GF, nor any other program will make it look better as the flaws also get enlarged.
Regards, Murray

[akvis]

You can try the Magnifier program which allows increasing photos without loss in quality. You can get images up to 900 millions pixels!
Tutorial:
http://akvis.com/en/magnifier-tutorial/howwork/howwork.php

[Markzebra]

WARNING - you don't have to waste money buying anything new. Photoshop Bicubic smoother does almost exactly the same job as Genuine Fractals, so close that you would have to have disappeared extremely far up your own backside to see the difference.

Upsampling - producing more pixels is not rocket science, despite what the makers of these plugs will have you believe. You can't make something out of nothing, and no-one can. A couple of versions ago Adobe worked very hard at improving the resampling with, among other things, two new options bicubic smoother and sharper. This effectively made Genuine Fractals and the others obsolete. Problem was, it wasn't trumpeted loudly enough, and no-one noticed.

If you take the image you have and upsample it proportionately (200 or 400%) using Bicubic smoother, you will see straight away pretty well the best that is possible. You will not be getting anything extra using Gen Fractals. There is arguably, extremely arguably, a very subtle difference in darker tones, but its not worth the outlay

[Juergen D]

I purchased the Re-Sizer Action Pack the other day. Have not tested it too much yet, but it seems to do a nice job.

Juergen

[Kraellin]

you might also want to check the various resizing methods within photoshop and paint shop pro. i dont use the default in psp.

and i dont use any of these, nor am i necessarily recommending any of them, but you can check them out for yourself:

PhotoZoom

Genuine Fractals

BlowUp

[Joeven]

If your using CS2 then there is no need to spend any money on 3rd party stuff. Bicubic Smoother does a good job. Just sharpen it correctly afterwords and your ready to go. I've used Alien Skin Blowup and couldn't see any difference. Use what you already have.

Joe

[L33t]

Originally Posted by Juergen D

I purchased the Re-Sizer Action Pack the other day. Have not tested it too much yet, but it seems to do a nice job.

Juergen

Hey I've checked the website, it looks cool... too cool that it looks fake. Can you do the very X-Large and show how it looks like for you.

[Juergen D]

It says somewhere that the amount of resizing and its quality depends on the size of the original.

I took a screen shot from their website and applied the 300% enlargement. My 'original' is 315 x 241 pixels, the resized version is 945 x 723 (is that not 900% ??).

Juergen

[pixelzombie]

i ran a test using a very sharp image as a starting point and i compared photoshop against
alienskin blowup, there was enough of a difference that my supervisor and his boss(who is very cheap) felt it was worthy of a purchase..you can download a 30 trial version of blowup and try it for yourself...