image blow up

cormie

If I was to design an image on photoshop or what not, and it was only the size of a5 page when printed, is there a way to enlarge to a4, a3, a2, a1 etc without losing quality? Like the way they do it when blowing up photos. Or would it just get all pixelated? I've seen a regular photo (about 6x4 inches) be blow up to something which must have been about 2 metres by 1.5 or something like that and the quality was fine for the size of it. Is there a way to do this and make it compatible in the same way for printing to a massive scale? thanks

DadaKopf

Not really. Even when you blow up a photo you lose quality - how much depends on the film's resolution.

The same goes with digital.

Your ability to get high quality enlargements will depend on the image's print size and resolution. If the print size is, for example, about 'A5' and its resolution 1200, you could probably enlarge it to A4 no problem. Anything bigger and you get into trouble.

Let me put it this way: the Canon EOS D10 produces 15 megapixel RAW images that can (just about) be enlarged to A3. Half that would give you half the size, A4. And so on.

I understand you can be smart imaging programs that can fill in the gaps left by diminishing resolution as you enlarge, but I don't know what the products are called.

cormie

when I was talking about the photo I saw blown up, it wasn't done with the original film, just the photo itself. It's like they scanned it and printed it 100x bigger with no loss in quality for the size of it! it was smooth, unlike what you would see if you were to do the same thing using mspaint or whatever. Thanks

SickBoy

PhotoZoom Pro from S-Spline is a good little app for resizing images and avoiding pixelation(only to a certin extent of course). I think they have a free trial too
Give it a go...

Giblet

Get someone with Photoshop or Paintshop Pro to do it, they have smart resize tools.

leeroybrown

The reason you can blow up photos (even the prints themselves) so much is that film based camera's actually produce an incredibly high quality image source. Even the final print is exposed from a very high quality source. If you have a very good scanner close to hand put a photo in it and zoom in on peoples eyes - theres a huge amount of detail still there in the print.

If you were to design an image in Photoshop or another bitmap based graphics package then your ability to enlarge the image would very much depend on the image itself and how well the image techniques can deal with it. If you use a Vector based image (Fireworks or similar) then you have a lot more scope to enlarge as a lot of your source information (obviously bitmap components you use will cause problems) will be infinitely enlargable.

cormie

please explain
Thank you

i have photoshop by the way:)

leeroybrown

Photoshop / PaintShop and the majority of other graphics programs are bitmap image programs meaning the represent the image as R/B/G/Alpha pixels.

Fireworks and some other image apps can handle their image components as Vector data (mathematical data). This means they can be stretched infinitely with no distortion. Obviously bitmap image data imported into vector apps is still subject to loss of quality when it's transformed/enlarged but any vector components won't degrade at all.

The best design advice is to create a Photoshop image of suitably high quality so it is usable at your maximum print size. It's very easy to reduce most images in size with no noticable change at all.

cormie

so can you draw images and designs in fireworks and print them as large as you want or is it just pre set text/clip art you can use? I have fireworks but don't want to install if I don't need it.

Thanks:)

Giblet

Vectors rely heavily on gradients for any sort of detail and are a pain in the ass to create, think of it as design a 3d image in 2d.