Expert: Glen Demers - 5/27/2011

Question
Hello,

You recently posted a question to keith in category Adobe Photoshop:

Aloha Glen,

I am working on a project that requires my photos to be enlarged to a 3' high by 10' wide panel. When we take one of my existing photos and blow it up, everything looks pretty bad. I shoot in raw at 14 megapixels on a Kodak Z981.

What can I do to improve the quality of the resolution in order to be enlarged that big?

Answer
Hi Mark,

First, find out the optimum resolution recommended by the people outputting your images. On large format images that are typically viewed from a distance 56 to 100 dpi should be fine.

Shoot the images as large as you can, set your camera to it's highest resolution setting.

When you enlarge these in Photoshop, use bicubic interpolation and only enlarge them about 10% at a time until you get to your target size. Once at size you can try to improve the look of the image by using the noise filter and unsharp masking.

Here's some advice for using the sharpen filter; http://is.gd/Hv8eyw

Hope this helps,

Glen Demers
Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop 7
Prepress Technician, Best Printing Online
www.bestprintingonline.com

For more Photoshop tips please visit our help pages here: http://www.bestprintingonline.com/photoshop.htm