Wednesday 29 June 2011

Resampling to Make Pictures Bigger

Resampling or, Interpolation, as it's also called is a process where the software analyses the image content and then adds, or subtracts pixels, depending whether you are resampling up, or down.
The mathematical algorythm that kind of works all this out is called Bicubic Resampling.  Elements and Photoshop have three options: plain old Bicubic which is what we all used to have before Adobe released two more specific types of adding/subtracting pixel algorythms called Bicubic Smoother (for making it go BIGGER and Bicubic Sharper, for when you need to make the image smaller (i.e. for emailing).

Both work amazingly well considering BUT, a word of warning. If you start with a very small file, you should only enlarge the image a bit (maybe 5- 10%. Yes, sorry, it's not totally magic! However, if you start with a 6Mp original, you could double its size quite easily and get a great result. Here's a video describing how to do this using Photoshop Elements...