Ok folks, i have a pic taken at fairly low resolution (1600×1200) from a holiday that i really would like to have blown up into a large print for a wall hanging – something like 30x20cm or larger if poss.

Looked on some online processing sites and it appears the pic is too low quality to do so, any ideas as to how i can achieve my aim – remember i know nowt about photography and even less about computer techy stuff!

If its from a mobile phone – you might be in trouble.

Big prints (eg larger posters) tend to be printed at 154dpi so you can gauage quality from there- but thats assuming a reasonable camera and lens.

Someone will be along in a mo to suggest a way of inventing pixels but I’d suggest a max print size of 11 x 8.5 inches approx (assuming decent lens etc). Be aware that at bigger size other factors can make the print look poor too – focus, noise, small sensors etc.

If you want – email me the original and I’ll give more accurate guesstimate of what’ll look good.

I get prints done up to bus shelter sized ads from some odd sources – so you never know.

uprez it in photoshop but try different methods (bicubic smoother or sharper) and compare at 100%, if there are areas of smooth tone i would add noise (experiment with values of .5-2)
maybe a little sharpening but don’t oversharpen so it looks gritty.
if you print on watercolour/rag or canvas it will look better than gloss.

You won’t really gain anything by upsizing it. MrSmith’s tips kind of work in a pinch.

The best best is to print on the coarsest medium possible, which is canvas. I’ve seen canvases printed about the same dpi as you’re planning and they’ve looked fine.

If you’re printing on paper you’re really pushing it. You could try a cheapish experiment by cutting one quarter (800×600) from your picture – just crop it – and then take that to Boots or Jessops and print that at 6×4″. That will show you what a quarter of the image will look like when the full thing’s printed at 12×8″. Matt paper will give you a better result than gloss.

Beware that depending on the camera (or any subsequent processing) settings there could be significant “jpeg artefacts” from the data compression. So even if the picture has enough pixels it doesn’t guarantee good quality. It is impossible to create the data you don’t have so the suggestions above are just about printing it in such a way that you don’t really notice the lack of resolution/detail.

Hi muddydwarf. Your best bet is probably a fractal based image resizing program. Photoshop can only go so far. If you email me the image I will do everything I can with it then send it back to you.

I’m a photographer and deal with image resizing and stuff regularly. It’s hard to tell exactly what can be done without seeing the image. After resizing, it might need a lot of tweaking to reduce noise, Jpeg artifacts etc. This can be a fine balance. If you are going to have a print done on canvas you can get away with more than if you were printing on a glossy paper, so let me know what you intend to do.

Email me at…… info AT silascollins DOT com.

I will help all I can 🙂

Regards,
S

muddydwarf,

Just checked the software on my mac. I have a program that should do the trick. It’s called Genuine Fractals. You can buy it as a plugin for Photoshop for about £50. Probably not worth buying for a one off print so send over your pic and I will run it through, I can’t promise anything but should give you a fighting chance.

Just done a quick test on one of my low res images with GF. Works well, send me ya stuff…..

Upsize as suggested above. It’ll look fine, particularly if you print on canvas which is very forgiving.

Will do Moonhead and ta!

The camera is a Fiji finepix S5800 model, and what happened was that the new 4Gb SD card i fitted prior to going away decided to stop talking to the camera even though it had been formatted etc.
In order to get any pics i had to ditch the SD card and use the camera memory, and reduce the quality to 2M to get a reasonable number of pics.