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How do you go about making a framable quality picture out of some tiny jpg you found on the internet?Hi. I want to make a wall in my apartment an ode to many of my musical heroes. I want framed pictures of their faces. I've got most of the pictures I want, saved to my HD but printing them as is would mean teeny-tiny frames. And blowing them up makes them look crappy. How do I get nice framable pictures? I want full on photo or poster style glossy with color. Any ideas? (i'm surely not even describing this very well but... help!)
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10 Answers
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There is nothing you can do about the small images you get off the internet in order to make them better, unfortunately.
Here's the deal: when people put images on the internet, they should be making them at 72 dpi (dots per inch or ppi pixels per inch), because screen resolution is 72 ppi/dpi (there is a difference between dpi and ppi, but that isn't relevant here that much).
The reason why you want to use 72 ppi images instead of 250 ppi images or something is that for viewing it on the screen it doesn't matter, but the images will LOAD to the screen TONS faster the smaller they are.
Basically, images operate within the confines of resolution and width x height. If you have a super huge image, like 24 inches by 24 inches or something and it is 72 dpi, you CAN trade in the inches for dpi...this means you can make the image like 12x12 inches and then the resolution would be significantly higher. Then when you go to print the image the quality would be better.
Oh, I forgot to mention: the higher resolution, the better print quality you will get. I would say minimum resolution for anything decent to print would be 200 ppi/dpi.
There is just NO WAY you can get a decent image for printing out of a 3x3 inch picture that has 72 dpi. Even if you change the resolution with photoshop or something, the upped image will be simply added data that is not correct-looking.
What you CAN do though is this: if you have access to an image manipulating program like photoshop, you can use your internet image as a base for some kind of art project of the person you want a picture of. You can apply filters and paint and lighting effects to your heart's content and make it look even LESS like a regular photo. (I don't think you could legally sell them or anything, because you are really using someone else's photo, but for your own use it would be fine.)
AND if you don't have access to photoshop, then get creative with the photo...print it out and photocopy it, rescan it, muck it up, mess with it, add type to it, etc. etc.
Anyway, if you want photographic quality images at poster size, you really need the original, high resolution image.
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One option to get around the poor-quality, grainy images is to make a rasterized image. You can convert images on this site:
http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/
Check out some of the examples posted.
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You can search on Google for images of your musical heroes, but narrow the search to an image search, and narrow the image search to "large" size in the options. The larger images are higher resolution. Also, if you go to Wikimedia Commons you can find lots of photos of all kinds of things that are in the public domain, many of them high res.
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Most pictures on the internet are compressed .jpg files. The have small file sizes, and look good on screen. However, as you've noticed, that does not translate to a good looking print.
Print quality pictures are a different beast. You need uncompressed high-resolution files (.tif, .png, or .bmp). Most digital cameras save files in .jpg format, and these can print OK, but you need a large file (2MB or more, which is larger than you can usually download from websites).
Unfortunately, there's no way to convert from a compressed .jpg back to a high-res file. Once that small .jpg is created, and the image is compressed, the high resolution is lost forever.
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Can you give us an example of the smallest (in pixels) source photo you have? The largest constraint on getting decent prints from the images you have will be the existing image quality, if it's only a thumbnail sized jpeg you won't be able to make a decent poster out of it.
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Mahtli69 is right on. There's almost nothing you can do to get a small web JPG to print out "nice". Once the file is compressed it is small forever. That's the problem with pulling images from the web. The majority of web images are small and lo-res (so they are quick to load on the web pages). The majority of them are not of print quality.
I suggest you go to the library, do some hunting for books or magazines with the people you are looking for, then scan these images in yourself at a hi-res (hopefully you or someone you know has a scanner). You may have to do some photo editing to get the settings right, but at least this way you can scan the image in at a much larger size. Make friends with a graphic designer. They'll help you out.
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You won't have any luck with the jpgs themselves for the other reasons mentionned here, but if you don't mind a more illustration-y look, you can always try converting them to a scalable vector image. Probably the easiest way to do this is by importing the image (you may have to scale it first, then import it) into a vector program like Adobe Illustrator (something like Inkscape may do as well, plus it's free/open source) and using a function called Trace Bitmap or something similar depending on the program. Scalable vectors are by their nature resolution independant and you could techically scale them to the size of a bus if you wanted to, though it's not going to give you a 100% realistic look like a hi-res photo would. Best results are usually achieved by tracing the image yourself (instead of autotracing) but it takes more time and you may be able to come up with something reasonable through autotrace and some trial and error.
Here's an example of what it could look like: http://www.kristarella.com/2007/11/vectormagic-vs-inkscapes-bitmap-trace/
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Ask the writers for CSI. Zoom. Enhance. Zoom. Enhance.
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Without rasterbating it or finding a new image, you're more or less out of luck.
If you have Photoshop, you could try going to Image Size and kicking the Pixels/Inch to 300, but that'll still leave it pretty small, I would guess. If you do have to blow it up further, do it 10% at a time to get the best results.
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Go to a university or other library that has an ArtStor subscription. You'll probably find all sorts of suitable large, high-quality images in that database. However, it's subscription only and rather pricey, hence hitting a library.
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