editing photos help

[gossipgirl]

I was just wondering how when editing photos to make pictures bigger. Like for example how can you make a small picture bigger without them being really fuzzy.

 

[Miss Kelly]

I'm not understanding your question. Are you trying to increase the resolution of a photograph in order to get it printed larger?

 

[gossipgirl]

I'm wanting to make small pictures bigger without them fuzzy.

 

[mabas9395]

You can't do it.

Are you old enough to remember Silly Puddy? You could press it against the Sunday comics and the comic would appear on your Puddy. If you wanted to make the comic bigger, all you had to do was stretch the puddy. But when you did that it made the comic all blurry. Your problem is a lot like that.

A digital picture is made up of dots called pixels. And your picture has a size such as 1200 by 1800 pixels (for example). When you print a picture your printer will put a certain number of pixel into each inch of your photo. Different printers use a different number, but lets use 300 dots for an example. If you want to print your 1200 by 1800 pixel photo on a 300 dot printer, your picture will be 4 inches by 6 inches (1200/300 = 4 and 1800/300 = 6).

If you want to takes that same picture and print it as an 8x10, you would need a file that is 2400 by 3000 pixels (8 inches x 300 dots =2400 pixels needed). The only way to get your smaller file to print that big is to "stretch" each pixel so that your 1200 pixels cover the same area as 2400. Its not a literal stretching as much it knows what half of the pixels look like (your 1200) and has to guess what the other half should be so the total is 2400. The more pixels the computer has to guess at the blurrier your photo will be. There is software like Photoshop that is supposed to do a better job at guessing what the missing pixels look like.

As usual, some of my terminology and/or concepts may be slightly off, but this is essentially the case.

 

[NostalgicDad]

Although there is some new technology out there that will allow you to do this, it's better suited right now for shrinking a photo using content awareness and removing pixels. When enlarging it will add pixels to the photo but I'm not completely sold on it as I've used seam carving in an attempt to enlarge and I get some pretty strange results. Hopefully it will be perfected soon as it really is pretty cool how it works. Here's a thread where we briefly talked about it last week.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Photos are made up of tiny dots called pixels. If you make a picture bigger, your editor is adding more dots. It has to guess at what those dots would be. Some software is better than others at guessing, but none can add detail where it isn't.

 

[gossipgirl]

Although there is some new technology out there that will allow you to do this, it's better suited right now for shrinking a photo using content awareness and removing pixels. When enlarging it will add pixels to the photo but I'm not completely sold on it as I've used seam carving in an attempt to enlarge and I get some pretty strange results. Hopefully it will be perfected soon as it really is pretty cool how it works. Here's a thread where we briefly talked about it last week.

thanks.