However, by and large, PSE does not do that bad a job of enlarging up by 60 percent, and assuming you already owned a copy of PSE or PhotoShop then you did not have to spend any money to do this. However on closer inspection you will notice the blacks have lost their crispness, the hair on the back of the bee has become quite blurred, and the red centre of the flower now appears out of focus. On the first quick viewing this enlargement using PSE9 does not look too bad.

So it takes five enlargement steps to get to the final size, shown below. Then after I add 10 pixels of border I am finished because my posting width is 650 pixels. So the first enlargement is to 440x, then to 480x, then to 530x, then 580x, and finally to 640x. The recommended way to enlarge using PhotoShop or PSE is in increments of about 10 pecent. It does a reasonable job, but as you will see even with this relatively low rate enlargement from 400x to 650x, which in only an enlargement of about 60 percent, there is a lot of clarity and colour definition lost. If you have PhotoShop or PhotoShop Elements (PSE) v8 or higher you can use that to enlarge an image. In this exercise I am going to enlarge this picture (shown at right) from 400x up to my posting width of 650x.Įnlarging using PhotoShop Elements (or PhotoShop) The two approaches I am going to very quickly cover are using PhotoShop Elements (v8 or higher) and a ‘smart’ raster enlarger such as PhotoZoom. Having said that, following are a couple of ways of making pictures bigger if you really need to and you are prepared to accept some loss of quality. No matter how you go about making a raster picture larger it is going to lose definition, and depending how you do it, it will will become ‘washy’ and/or pixelated, the fine detail will become blurry, the blacks will fade, you get blobbing (looks like someone flicked water onto it), and you will get jaggies on the diagonals. So now some 18 months later I am posting Part 3 which is going to talk about enlarging a raster image.īasically the answer to the question “How do I make my picture bigger without it looking like crap?” is that you can’t. “Working with Raster Images: Part 2-Lots of Square ‘dots’” ( here).“Working with Raster Images: Part 1-What are Raster Images?” ( here), and.Way back in January 2012 I did a couple of postings about working with raster images.

Crop with photozoom classic 7