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Bair Art Edition's Tutorial on:
Epson Professional Printing Workflow
Resizing Images
This topic is highly debated. Everyone has their own little techniques that they swear by, or third party plugins and programs that use either fractal or wave technology to determine how to create extra pixels from existing pixels.
For now, we're going to keep it simple and easy by sticking to straight resampling in Photoshop. Before you do "rez-up" your images consider a few things:
- You must have a fair amount of pixels to begin with. Go here for a table on acceptable base resolutions. You can't make "something out of nothing," but you can come close if you start with a little bit of "something."
- Resizing can improve image quality, but only to a point. We've found that interpolating up will only go as much as 4x, and even that's a stretch. In other words, a good 8 x 10 can be made to look fairly good still at 16 x 20 through interpolation.
- Nothing can beat the quality of a good lens! This is incredibly important!!! If you are not shooting with an interchangable lens camera, you should be, and then invest in a quality lens. Of course if you never want to print larger than 8 x 10, you'll do fine, but if you want 16 x 20's or larger, get some really expensive lenses. If you are shooting with a cheap lens, you may be getting 1/2 to 1/3 the pixel quality that you could be getting otherwise.
The most basic method of resizing the image is to open the Image Size... window in Photoshop under the Image menu.
Select "Resample Image: Bicubic." (Other available methods, i.e. nearest neighbor, aren't as good). Dial in the print size and resolution (ppi) that you want, and be sure to have Constrain Proportions selected!
If you read the last module (Optimal Resolution), you'd remember that the image I was looking at was 8 x 10 @ 252.75 ppi, and now I'm making it exactly 4x as large by selecting both "Constrain Propotions" and "Resample Image."
Now I could rez it up to 360 (maximum resolution before you are wasting pixels), and I probably will, but after 4x, not much more quality is squeezed out, just larger file sizes.
More File Preparation:
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- Stephen Bair, Utah Wedding Photographer
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© 2008 Masterlab
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