In article , Tim Robertson
wrote:

Got a rookie question from someone who is trying to understand all I know about pixels and resolution. When zooming or enlarging, a certain amount of distortion takes place. I have seen software on TV programs that can enhance pictures and remove this distortion. Is this a fantasy thing or is this something that can be done with Elements?

If a picture is, say, 1000 by 1000 pixels and is displayed on your screen at full size ('Actual pixels' in the view menu) then each pixel in the window corresponds to one pixel in the picture. If you now zoom in further so that the picture is displayed at 200% then each pixel in the picture is displayed as a block of 2x2 pixels on the screen. At 400% it's displayed as 4x4 pixels on the screen. I guess this is what you mean by 'distorted'. When you zoom in there are no more pixels left in the picture so Elements simply prints each one more than once.

There's nothing you can do about this. There is no more information in the picture. All graphics applications behave this way. However, if you want to permanently make the picture larger you can resize it instead. If you do this then although Elements will attempt to invent new pixels to fill in the gaps. It will do this by examining the pixels surrounding each pixel and make up something in between. For example, if you have two adjacent real pixels one of which is 100% red and the other of which is 50% red then Elements might, reasonably, invent a new pixel to put in between them which is 75% red.

These new pixels are pure inventions and there are a number of different systems for working them out but they still remain pure inventions. The resized image will look a lot better than simply zooming in but it will not look anything like as good as if you had taken the picture with more pixels in it in the first place.

Zoom and resize are there for different purposes. Zoom is an editing tool for when you might want a better view of the pixels in the picture. If you're editing the picture at the pixel level you want to know what is really there not what might be there.

Hope this helps.

Tim Robertson

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