Increasing Imgae size in Photoshop!

[Terminator]

Hey,

I am in a little fix with one of my favorite photographs.
Its shot with a 6 mega pixel Sony cam.
I have done the necessary adjustments & processing & have saved it in .tif format,sounds good till here...

However I was disappointed to see the image size in adobe,which suggests that the current number of pixels in my image only permit to print it at 6*8 size at 200 pixels per inch,which is worrying me.
I wished to print it at 16*20 size with 200 pixels per inch,if not then at least at 12*8 .

I understand that the image on screen does look better even on high magnification which does not holds true for a print out of similar size.
I was then thinking about increasing the image size to desirable 12*8 or even 16*20 at 200 ppi using Photoshop.

Kindly suggest if its going to do any any good to my purpose or would this enlargement degrade the image quality considerably?

 

[Big Mike]

Yes, you can use Photoshop to enlarge your digital image. And yes, there will be some degradation to the quality when you do it. But it's up to you to decide how much degradation is acceptable. You might not know until you actually print the photo.

Also, you may not need 200 PPI. One of the big on-line labs in the US, MPIX, only requires 100 PPI as a minimum for printing photos. So it's up to you to decide the best method....you could enlarge the image to get your 200 PPI and risk too much degradation, or you could only go to 100 PPI but risk pixelization on the print.

Either way, when you use Photoshop to enlarge your image, go to the 'Image' menu and select 'Image Size'. Choose the 'bi-cubic smoother' option.

I forgot to mention that you can actually print to just about any size you want....but you need to keep the viewing distance in mind. A 24x30 inch print may not look good from that camera, at least not when you are only 12 inches from it. But if you hang it on the wall and take three steps back, it probably looks OK.

 

[KmH]

On the recommendation of Vincent Versase and Scott Kelby, I use the Bicubic Sharper algorithm to up-rez images in Photoshop.

 

[Garbz]

Kindly suggest if its going to do any any good to my purpose or would this enlargement degrade the image quality considerably?

There will always be a degrade but the question you should be asking yourself is what do you want to achieve in the end?

If the image is going to be 20" accross and you don't have 200ppi to work with viewers who look at the image up close are likely to see individual pixels. If you resample and upscale the image so it's 200ppi they will likely see the picture is not sharp from that close. It's a tradeoff you will need to consider.

The other question is do you need 200ppi for an image 20" accross? Sure there'll be people who the first thing they do when they see a picture that big is get close to see how sharp it is, but on the flip side people who are looking at it will likely just as Mike said, take a few steps back and volah, the lower resolution will no longer be a problem.

To see how bad the problem is just print the picture on any ****ty printer at the original size, and just click yes when photoshop complains that it's larger then the paper and you'll crop the image. That'll show you how big the pixels are, but won't show you how far away you will be standing, so don't get too alarmed if it looks crap.

 

[Terminator]

Thanks for your suggestion guys,that was helpful.
I plan to go for a 16*24 after increasing the ppi from 103 to150.
I guess such a petty addition to the no of pixels is not going to bring any remarkable fall in quality,specially when its going to be hung on a wall.

 

[jack58]

If you had the CS5 plugin onOne Genuine Fractals you could do it very easily.