From the course: Photoshop: Tips and Quick Fixes

How do I enlarge—up-res—my photo? - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop: Tips and Quick Fixes

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How do I enlarge—up-res—my photo?

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- A lot of times you'll end up with an image that's the wrong resolution. Now, there are many ways to go about resizing an image, but ultimately you have to remember that when you're up-resing, you're creating new pixels that don't originally exist. This means that the computer is going to interpolate the information and do its best to come up with new pixels. Oftentimes this works pretty well, but it is not a never ending fountain of pixels. You can't keep blowing up an image forever. Let me show you what Photoshop can do. Inside of Photoshop, you can choose Image, Image Size. This will show you the existing image and resolution. So let's go ahead and reassign this to a resolution of 300 pixels per inch. And I see that this is about a six inch by three and a half inch print. And unfortunately, I need a larger output. I need this to be about 17 inches wide and about eight and a half inches tall. So in order to get there, I'm going to resize to 17 and let the width and height stay constrained. Now you'll notice in doing this that that drops the resolution down. So let's check the box here for Resample and we'll type in the target resolution. Now when we do this, it's going to attempt to resize the image and the preview window here will show you a simulation of what that's going to look like so you can check the results and see if you're getting adequate details. What you want to pay attention to is the Resample method. Automatic is designed to be sort of leave it and forget it. It is going to be used for both upscaling and downscaling. But what you're most likely going to want to take advantage of is the ones that are specifically labeled for enlargement. You'll notice here for example that we have Preserve Details and a newer method called Preserve Details 2.0. We also have the Bicubic Smoother which is really good if you have to enlarge an image to a very large size and you want it to softly blur it so it doesn't look pixelated. I'm going to go with the default here for a moment, Preserve Details Enlargement. And you see that we get the ability to reduce noise in the image so that as we enlarge it, it doesn't get noisy or grainy. That looks pretty good, let's click OK. And there is the new image. What I would suggest is zooming in to 100% so you can really judge details. And in this case, it did a pretty good job of maintaining the details within the photo. Let's undo for a moment. And we'll invoke that command again. And this time we'll go to the 17-inch print, leaving things constrained there. There we go. And we'll type in 300. And we'll take advantage of Preserve Details 2.0. Same thing here, the ability to reduce noise. And when you click OK, it uses the newer algorithm. And in this case, as I zoom in and check some of the details, that's actually looking a little bit crisper to me. Some of those fine details like the rivets held up a bit better. Now, you can choose between the two methods and see which one gives you the results that you want. Now earlier I mentioned that I wanted to change the size of this image to a different shape. You earlier learned about the Crop Tool, but you can also take advantage of the Canvas Size command. In this case, I can resize the height to eight and a half. And I'm going to simply tell that to stay centered. And when I click OK, it's going to crop the image. And you see we have the new delivery size ready for use. The use of the Resize command is pretty straightforward. The key here is to make sure you change the sampling method. If you're going to enlarge the image, experiment with the two sharpening options that are going to be best for enlargement. I find that version 2 usually works better, but they have preserved the original in case you have an affinity for that or it gives you better results with a specific image.

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