I see nobady wants to touch this with a 10 foot pole…here is the thing…an image that is 72 resoluion is meant for web viewing only. In order to make it satisfactory for print it has to be at least 150 dpi…soooo, you would need to ‘upsample’ the image which basically adds similar pixels but is rarely satisfactory for print when so much is being resampled. Perhaps you can have the sender send it at a good printing resolution..at least 300.
Catherine, Jodi is right; there simply aren’t enough pixels in what you were sent to make a decent print much larger than 2×3 – and that’s before cropping. It would make an even smaller acceptable photo if cropped. Best bet: see if the originator can send you something with a higher resolution.
Yeah. . .I finally get it. You can’t put more resolution in "from thin air". Now I know that I have to ask for a pic to be at least 300 ppi before I can even consider printing it. That is just great!!! Is it hard for the sender to convert a pic? Can you offer me some easy to understand directions? Thanks, Catherine
Catherine, it depends on whether the sender has the original scan or digital camera picture. If he/she is working from a low-res original, the same problem will occur, just a step up the chain from you. The best bet is to tell the sender to use Elements and save a copy of the original as a JPEG without doing any changes in resolution. If their camera is a 3-megapixel type, the original image will be something like 2000 pixels by 1500 pixels, which will make a nice 5×7 or even larger. But they have to send it to you before they throw away any original pixels.
The biggest problem you might encounter with this approach is the file size might be pretty large. You could ask the sender to save as a medium compression JPEG, which will make the file a good bit smaller. Hopefully, they have Elements, Microsoft Picture-It or some other basic picture editing software that can be used for this relatively basic purpose.
Hope that helps. Please come back if you start a dialog with the sender and more questions arise.
Chuck
Chuck, maybe if the sender has the original image directly from the camera she could just send it that way and let Catherine do the re-sizing properly with Elements. Catherine seems to have a good handle now on what do to. If they both have high speed connection it shouldn’t be too painful.
I can’t tell you how many times I have been sent images that are completely worthless for print.
What about using Scot Kelby’s method of increasing the size by 10% increments with resample checked? I haven’t tried it yet but in his book "Photoshop Elements for the Digital Photographer" he claims that by doing it this way the image doesn’t soften or blur. Has anyone tried this out?
Terri
I’ve tried this method, Terri, and it does OK, but in this particular situation that’s asking a whole lot of that trick. This lady hasn’t got much to start with, and she only wants a portion of the whole. It wouldn’t hurt to try, but the results aren’t going to be great – certainly there’s no way it can make a silk purse from a sow’s ear! 🙂
Beth,
True. I had never tried it, and wondered just how effective his "trick" was when put to test. Thanks for the heads up. I guess I won’t be giving that "trick" a go anytime soon.
Terri
Could she put it on Pbase at the largest size/rez? Then when you download it, shouldn’t it be OK? My family downloads my pictures all the time from pbase(and others,the ones that I put up full size for this purpose), and are able to print without any problem. Like when Grant puts up the hi rez Challenges?
Is this workable?, remember I am new at this stuff.
Jane
Terri – that trick of upsizing by ten per cent at a time works better than a straight resize all in one hit – but there is a limit to what it can do (I’ve gone up to doubling an image size and it definitely works) It works better the sharper and clearer the original image is – a good sharp digicam image can be upsized more than one might expect (for some reason scanned in images don’t seem to work half as well for me – probably as my camera is much better than my scanner!)
