Image editing programs and information

I recieved a small family jpeg from a relative in an Email attachment. It cannot be enlarged without becoming fuzzy. What do i have to do to allow it to be enlarged and remain in focus? Any free programs available or forums? I have an XP system. Thanx.

 

I'm afraid you can't enlarge bitmap images (jpg bmp png gif etc) and keep the same quality. It's due to the image resolution.

If you imagine and picture which is 1 inch square and is 100 pixels by 100 pixels (100dpi - dots per inch) and you enlarge it to twice the size to 2 inches square those 100 pixels will stretch to fill the 2 inches, this means that in the space of one inch you now only have 50 pixels (50dpi) and the picture will look blocky. But.. if you have an image one inch across which is 600 dpi and you enlarge it to 2 inches across the end result will be a 300 dpi image which is still a reasonable quality. Your results depend on the resolution of the image you start with.

There are tools which you can use within packages such as Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro etc which can improve the appearance of the image but there's a limit to what you can do. Expecially if your original image is small. Bicubic Smoother/Sharpner will help. Plugings for Photoshop like Blow Up by Alienskin is good too but at a price (best part of $200 just for the plugin). Here's a link to a good jpg enlargment walkthrough just using Photoshop tools http://www.photoshopsupport.com/tutorials/cb/enlarge.html

Best option of course is see if you can get hold of a larger version of the image.

If my attempts at explaining resolution are a bit confused then the links in the first paragraph might help explain it better!

 

Maybe ask them to send you the original size in a compressed folder. I'm not absolutely sure if that can be done, but maybe it's possible.

 

When you shrink a picture, you remove data from it. There's no way around that. And you can't magically re-create that data when you enlarge it. All you can do is expand the existing data to a larger size. If you have every other page of a book, can you just add more pages in and have the whole story? Same kinda thing here.