So a friend of a friend has a large format printer, he said I can do some canvas prints at cost but he’s busy so I have to do everything myself and just turn up to do the prints.

I want to do some fairly large prints, say 24″ x 36″

So what’s the best way to enlarge photos without them going blurry etc

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

The printer will do the enlarging, you just need to make sure the image has enough pixels to start with. If it doesn’t then no amount of editing will turn it into a hi-res image. Canvas prints are fairly forgiving so any reasonable quality photo from a proper camera should do it.

All you should do is a bit of tweaking if required (eg tweak the colours, photoshop out anything that shouldn’t be there) and possibly crop it (although you will want some bleed round the edge).

If the photo is good you shouldn’t really need to do anything, if it is a blurry, camera-phone image then maybe don’t use it

Thanks, I’ve just been told it’s an Epson 9600 so will try and get hold of the software and see if I can do anything with it.

What you need is one of those CSI type machines that you put a blurrry picture in and it magically makes it clear 😀

You should find out what dpi he’ll be printing it out at and from that you can work out how many pixels you’ll need to get the 24×36“ you mention above. So printing at 360 dpi you will need an image (360×36 X 360×24) pixels.

Photoshop it’s actually quite effective at increasing the size off images. I have a Scott Kelby book at home that describes the best way to do it. From memory, I think you do it in steps, rather than in one leap.

It might be worth finding out whether you need the images to be in a particular colour space too…

What you need is one of those CSI type machines that you put a blurrry picture in and it magically makes it clear

I’d like one too.
Especially to get a photo of what was behind me by enlarging the reflection in my subject’s eye/pupil. From a grainy CCTV camera. In the dark..

DrP

You don’t need to do it in steps anymore if you are using a recent version of photoshop as the interpolation algorithms are very good. You will probably have to sharpen for the bigger output but that is file/subject dependent and something that you ideally would have to see in print to decide on the amount and type of sharpening.

There is no ‘Epson printer software’ they may use a RIP but you just need to give them a decent file with a big colour space (adobe1998 not sRGB) and if its RGB leave it that way as the the printer will do a better job than you of converting if it needs CMYK .

What were the original photo’s taken with?

Photo’s at normal size look pretty much the same quality whether I took the picture with my compact or my D-SLR, but when you enlarge them…

Try just enlarging them on your PC first, it’ll give you an idea.

Thanks for the info guys, will look into it.

My pics were taken on a DSLR but i have some of my dad’s old pics from the 60s and 70s taken with an SLR, I was thinking of scanning them then enlarging.

Scan them in large to start with.

Scanning will be the key – just go for the highest DPI setting your scanner has

Scanning will be the key – just go for the highest DPI setting your scanner has

600-1200dpi would be fine, probably 600 would be all you need.

My pics were taken on a DSLR but i have some of my dad’s old pics from the 60s and 70s taken with an SLR, I was thinking of scanning them then enlarging.

Scanning slides is way tougher than getting good files from a DSLR. Another whole thread in itself….