Expert: LizaL - 8/28/2006

Question
How do I enlarge pixel size or resolution in photoshop? This is for silksceening since some images i get is too small. When i try to enlarge, the image breaks to big pixels.

Answer
Hi Ayed,

To increase the resolution of an image in Photoshop, you need to go to the Image pulldown menu and select Image Size. In this dialog box you'll see at the top a place where the current pixel dimensions are displayed.

You can change the pixel dimensions to anything you want, but a word of CAUTION... when you enlarge an image, and you resample it (that is, the Resample Image option box is checked, at the bottom of the dialog box), you'll increase its size, all right, but you're also asking Photoshop to do something called interpolation.

What this means is that Photoshop reads the image, and understands that there aren't enough pixels in it to make an image as large as you need, so therefore it has to create new pixels, based on the color and position of the existing pixels. It uses these interpolated pixels to "fill in" the areas that could potentially suffer from pixel loss, after being enlarged. This is usually why an image will break up and pixelate when it's enlarged from something very small to a large size.

There's really no way around this. You can always turn off Resample Image, but when you do that you'll notice that your image size will increase, but the resolution will DEcrease. And that's not usually an acceptable situation, either.

So from a technical standpoint, that's your answer. But from a quality control standpoint, you should go back to the people submitting the artwork and have them do it at a larger size so that you can scale *down* rather than up. There's usually never a problem doing that. It's just when you try and scale artwork up that the problems begin.

Hope this helps --

Lisa