Expanding images without losing definition

[Yellow Fang]

Is there a way of increasing the size of images without losing any sharpness or definition? I want to submit a paper to a journal, but they insist any illustrations have to be so big. Since I've ripped the pictures off from other papers, the only way I can make them bigger is to stretch them in Paint, unless I redraw them in Visio, which I really don't want to do. The problem is that the illustrations have to be sharp. If the journal thinks they have just been stretched, they'll reject them.

 

[aberal]

Is there a way of increasing the size of images without losing any sharpness or definition?

...'fraid not. Unless the images have high definition in the first place you can't "introduce" it artificially.

 

[rualexander]

....Since I've ripped the pictures off from other papers, ...

Would there not be some copyright issues here? Its unlikely the journal you are submitting to would want to publish any images that you don't have copyright to.

 

[Yellow Fang]

Would there not be some copyright issues here? Its unlikely the journal you are submitting to would want to publish any images that you don't have copyright to.

I have obtain copyright permission.

 

[ian turner]

Won't do you much good though because without the originals used for the illustrations you will be stuck with pixellation though you can try playing around with sharpening and anti aliasing and what have you to try and defuzz the image.
Try using Paint.net which is free and has all those fancy filters in that paint doesn't.

 

[red_tom]

Sadly not. Well, unless you're hunting for replicants.


View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-7iJPwrsw0


This bit of the film has always annoyed me. If the data isn't there, the data isn't freaking there...

 

[ColinJ]

I have obtain copyright permission.

You must have contacted the copyright owners to get permission to use their images - why not contact them again and ask for the copies of the original pictures?

 

[Yellow Fang]

You must have contacted the copyright owners to get permission to use their images - why not contact them again and ask for the copies of the original pictures?

I may do, but most of the copyright permission was granted by some automated process. They were mostly from journals from different publishers who may not require such big pictures.

What, I was thinking of doing was expanding the pictures, use some process to make the lines look less pixelated, then blank out the text and re-write it.

 

[ColinJ]

I may do, but most of the copyright permission was granted by some automated process. They were mostly from journals from different publishers who may not require such big pictures.

What, I was thinking of doing was expanding the pictures, use some process to make the lines look less pixelated, then blank out the text and re-write it.

You can use a decent photo-editing package to resample the pictures to a bigger size, but as mentioned above, software can't know what information would have been there, it just has to guess by some averaging process. You can resample the pictures upwards in size. They will look blurred but not pixellated .

Here's an example. I took a picture of Will Smith and resampled it to 5 times bigger (left), and just dumbly resized it to 5 times bigger (right). (The fuzzy edges are jpeg artifacts enlarged 5 times.)

 

[Crackle]

As others have said, if it isn't there.....

Decent free software that will resample bicubically is Gimp. You'll achieve way better results than Paint but whether it's good enough you'll have to see. Download and search Google under Gimp image resampling for tutorials how to do it.

 

[Melvil]

Genuine Fractals (http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/perfect-resize/features.html) is the industry standard for photo enlargement but costs a wee bit. Otherwise as others say, you're stuck with the data you've got. An easy, though pretty crude, alternative is to resize and then use a gaussian blur effect on photoshop to smooth out the pixels, but I'd recommend genuine fractals or obtaining the original pics.

Mel

 

[ColinJ]

Here you go - resizemypicture.com - I just tested it and it made a good job of doubling the size of one of my pictures.

 

[JtB]

Photoshop can enlarge and interpolate images, but I'm not a Photoshop expert so I don't know how it works. All I know is that several years ago my nephew used Photoshop to enlarge some photos from an old 3M pixel camera to 'larger than life' posters and they came out very nicely indeed.

 

[scots_lass]

Photoshop can enlarge and interpolate images, but I'm not a Photoshop expert so I don't know how it works. All I know is that several years ago my nephew used Photoshop to enlarge some photos from an old 3M pixel camera to 'larger than life' posters and they came out very nicely indeed.

Photoshop can do a 'free transform' on an image which will resize it quite well.

 

[ColinJ]

When you think about it - if you have an HDTV, it is resizing ('upscaling') any standard resolution TV broadcasts or DVDs that you watch. I've seen some pretty impressive examples of that but the picture quality is never as good as proper HD broadcasts or Blu-ray movies.

The same principle applies to enlarging photographs. Software can make quite a good job of it as long as you don't over-enlarge, but it would always be better to shrink a bigger image.