How to Make a Small Picture Bigger in Photoshop

Photoshop can be used to make better enlargments.

There are times when you might have the perfect picture for a project you are carrying out except that it is too small for your purposes. While you can just use a basic program to resize the image, the problem is that the result will probably not be the quality image you were hoping for. Most pictures (and all photos) are based on raster (or bitmap) graphics. These image are made up of individual dots called pixels, and when you do a straight enlargement of an image, you also make the dots bigger, resulting a jagged image. Fortunately, if you have Photoshop, there is a way you can minimize this problem when you do enlargements.

Instructions

1. Load the image that you want to work with onto your computer, either by transferring it from a digital camera or other digital source or by scanning it in.

2. Open Photoshop. Select "File" and click "Open." In the dialog box that pops up, browse to the image you loaded and open it.

3. Select "Image" from the menu and from the options choose "Image Size." A new dialog box will pop up.

4. Change the "Interpolation" method at the bottom from "Bicubic" to "Bicubic Smoother." Increase the pixel width and height to the final size that you want for your project and click "OK." This process is known as resampling. If your version of Photoshop doesn't have "Bicubic Smoother," use Step 5 instead. If it does, skip to step 6.

5. Increase the size of the image by 10 percent. Click "OK." Repeat this as many times as it takes to get the image to the size you want.

6. Select "File" and click "Save As." Name your file and save it as a high resolution JPEG.

References

• UNC Health Sciences LIbrary: Introduction to Photoshop