How to Make an Oversized Digital Photo Print

Photographs are one of the best ways to save memories and preserve special occasions. Sometimes these photos are placed in photo albums or loaded onto the Internet, but sometimes people like to blow them up and huge them on the wall. If you have taken a photo that you like so much that you would like to turn it into an oversized print for framing and hanging, you will want to have access to a good photo-editing program that will let you enlarge your image without too much loss of quality. A good program to use for this project is Adobe Photoshop, although a similar approach would work in the freeware program GIMP.

Difficulty:

Moderate

Instructions

1. Load your digital photo onto your computer by connecting your camera to the computer via the USB cord and transferring the file. If you have lost your original digital copy, you can scan in a print version, although you will not get the same quality. Set the scanner resolution to at least 600 to help reduce the moiré interference pattern that can occur in scanned photos.

2. Open Photoshop. Select "File" and click "Open." In the dialog that opens, browse to and open the photo you saved to your computer.

3. Select "Image" from the menu and click "Image Size." In the dialog that opens, go to the bottom and change the "Interpolation Type" to "Bicubic Smoother." Now change the sizing increments from pixels to inches and increase the numbers of the size of the photo to what you want for your oversized print. Click "OK."

4. Select "File" and click "Save As." Name the file, select the location you want to save to and save it as a high-resolution JPEG image.

5. Insert a blank CD into your computer. The system will pop up a dialog offering you options. Select "Make Into a Writeable CD" and click "OK."

6. Take the CD to a local printer that can do this type of printing. Or you could also take it to a store like Staples or Fedex/Kinkos because they also do oversized photo prints.

References

• Resizing and Resampling in Photoshop