Enlarging Web Images, Retaining Resolution

If you are a designer you know what it is like to download an image to use in your designs and find that it is too low of a resolution. It looks fine on your screen (as long as you don't zoom in), but try to enlarge it  for print or web and it looks noisy and pixelated. 

Or you finish a project, save it as a .jpg, and realize later that you needed a larger image. 

Maybe you have some old phone images that are really low resolution and you want to enlarge and share them or print them for your wall. Or you posted an image of your dog or cat 10 years ago on social media and you lost the original image and want to enlarge the web image.

Well, thankfully the newer versions of Photoshop have a great way to enlarge without pixelating your image. It is called Preserve Details 2.0 and I have tried this on photos, internet screenshots, and public domain images I found on the web and it works great!!! Seriously, if you do a lot of photography or design work this would be enough of a reason to get Photoshop CC.

I am going to post a Photoshop action soon for these steps so you can do it quickly.

Today I want to show you how I enlarged this old book page I found at The New York Public Library site.

I love this image and poem, but as you can see, the  largest download option is 760px which is much too small to use in my designs. 

I downloaded the image and here are the stats. This will only work posted small on websites as it is only 548 pixels wide and the resolution is 72 pixels/inch. And if I crop out the extra paper framing it, is going to be tiny!

This comes from our friend Rita at Coffee Shop Blog. Go to the web page for the completed tutorial!