Tenacious Creations

 Alright as promised in the camera buying guide. Here is how I have figured out how to enlarge digital pictures for poster size prints.

 If you read my camera buying guide you know that up until recently I only had 3.2 mega pixels to work with. While this worked well for most prints I always had distortion when printing 8 x 10s. I strive for perfection and this distortion was very annoying to me. So I figured out a way to reduce it so that my print outs were satisfactory to me.

 This method should work in any CS version of Photoshop, and you can probably apply the techniques in virtually any graphics editing program. This is likely not the best way to do this but I have found it to be the easiest and it gives me the results I am after.

So fire up PhotoShop and lets begin…..

1. Select the Photo you want to resize.
2. First lets check what the picture size is. We do this by going to the image drop down menu. You’ll see Image Size, select this and the following window should pop up.
   

   This picture is 4.688″ X 3.521″, which is half the desired size if we plan to print it as a 10 x 8. Now you could just type the dimensions 10 x 8 in the respective fields but I am sure you would find the out put less than desirable. However I have found a neat trick around this.

3. For some reason if you only increase the size by 10% at a time the picture does not seem to blur or get pixelated. So here is what you do. In the image size dialog make sure Resample Image is turn on. Under resample image in the drop down menu select - Bicubic Smoother (it will actually say best for enlargement). Switch the unit of measurement in the pop up windows to percent and type in 110. Your Image size window should look like the on below.
   
4. Hit OK and PhotoShop will increase the size of your photo. Now you could keep on doing this over and over again until you reach your desired size. But here is a case of something that is just screaming out to be made into an action. Go under the windows menu and choose Actions. When the action pallet appears select create new action.
   

5. Now name your new action. I named mine UpSize 110%. Then assign it to a function key, in my case I assigned it to F12.
   
6. Now click the record button and repeat step 3 remembering to hit the OK button. After the photo has resized another 10% hit the square stop button.
7. Now hit the F12 key or whatever function key you assigned to your action and your picture will resize by 10% each time that key is pressed. If you want to see my results click on the original image below and it will take you to the new image which is roughly 13″ x 10″.

 I have rarely if ever encountered any distortion by using this method. But I have been told if you do have distortion problems you can always use to sharpen to fix it it along the way. Look forward to a tutorial on photo sharpening coming soon.

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