patrific
11-21-2006, 08:00 PM
Upsizing in increments
Sometimes, we wish our picture had some more resolution and/or physical size so we can print it bigger. As time went on our Mega Pixels got more Mega, but we were still left wanting more. The problem with say, traditional sizing methods, they can cause problems such as artifacts and blurry “sizing up” problems. I want a picture that is a 100 % bigger or maybe 50 % bigger and I do not have “Genuine Fractals” (which is a good program for the price.) I am however going to show you something you can do for free (works in Photoshop and Elements) that works very well for up-sizing photos.
So let’s get a little technical here. When you resize up or make a larger picture then you are “resampling” your picture. In other words you are telling the software what to look at when “making up” pixels. You have several choices and I will suffice to tell you that you want to use the “bicubic” sampling when you resample or make your picture larger. The reasons for using bicubic or the differences in choices are beyond the scope of this article. Now, in modern versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements you have two bicubic methods to choose from – bicubic smoother and bicubic sharper. The rule of thumb in this instance is when making your picture larger use “smoother” and when you downsize or make your picture smaller then you should pick “sharper”. Depending on the version of the program, you may not see these bicubic options. In that case just select bicubic.
For this article we will assume we want to upsize a photo, which is much more common. So go to your menu and click on “Image” and find “Image Size” and click on that and you will get your Image Size dialog box. We love our dialog boxes when they are not too big. Anyway, I digress and now here is where you have all of the fun. In the box (near the bottom) is a check box that says, “Resample Image.” Check that box and pick the appropriate bicubic method (bicubic or bicubic smoother). Now in the same dialog box you want to go to the top where it says “Pixel Dimensions” and go to the top entry where it says “pixels” and drop it down and highlight “percent.” This area should now say “100” and “percent.” Now change the “100” to “110.” Click “OK” and you now made your picture 10% larger than it was before. To make it 50% larger you have to do this procedure 5 times and to make your picture twice its size then you need to do that procedure 10 times. There is technical reasons that I recommend doing this in increments although that is a whole article in itself. Experimentation and testing are the only ways to get to know what methods work best.
This is a good time to learn about “Photoshop Actions”. Using actions to make a 50% and a 100% action is a good idea if you upsize a lot of photos. Look for a future article on actions which will help you speed up your workflow.
I learned this at an NAPP conference several years ago and have been using this method ever since.
-PE
Sometimes, we wish our picture had some more resolution and/or physical size so we can print it bigger. As time went on our Mega Pixels got more Mega, but we were still left wanting more. The problem with say, traditional sizing methods, they can cause problems such as artifacts and blurry “sizing up” problems. I want a picture that is a 100 % bigger or maybe 50 % bigger and I do not have “Genuine Fractals” (which is a good program for the price.) I am however going to show you something you can do for free (works in Photoshop and Elements) that works very well for up-sizing photos.
So let’s get a little technical here. When you resize up or make a larger picture then you are “resampling” your picture. In other words you are telling the software what to look at when “making up” pixels. You have several choices and I will suffice to tell you that you want to use the “bicubic” sampling when you resample or make your picture larger. The reasons for using bicubic or the differences in choices are beyond the scope of this article. Now, in modern versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements you have two bicubic methods to choose from – bicubic smoother and bicubic sharper. The rule of thumb in this instance is when making your picture larger use “smoother” and when you downsize or make your picture smaller then you should pick “sharper”. Depending on the version of the program, you may not see these bicubic options. In that case just select bicubic.
For this article we will assume we want to upsize a photo, which is much more common. So go to your menu and click on “Image” and find “Image Size” and click on that and you will get your Image Size dialog box. We love our dialog boxes when they are not too big. Anyway, I digress and now here is where you have all of the fun. In the box (near the bottom) is a check box that says, “Resample Image.” Check that box and pick the appropriate bicubic method (bicubic or bicubic smoother). Now in the same dialog box you want to go to the top where it says “Pixel Dimensions” and go to the top entry where it says “pixels” and drop it down and highlight “percent.” This area should now say “100” and “percent.” Now change the “100” to “110.” Click “OK” and you now made your picture 10% larger than it was before. To make it 50% larger you have to do this procedure 5 times and to make your picture twice its size then you need to do that procedure 10 times. There is technical reasons that I recommend doing this in increments although that is a whole article in itself. Experimentation and testing are the only ways to get to know what methods work best.
This is a good time to learn about “Photoshop Actions”. Using actions to make a 50% and a 100% action is a good idea if you upsize a lot of photos. Look for a future article on actions which will help you speed up your workflow.
I learned this at an NAPP conference several years ago and have been using this method ever since.
-PE