Enlarging Images in Photoshop

Often, when you are getting ready to print your photos or other you realize that you need the image to be printed in a larger size than the one you originally planned for. In this case, you need to size the image up, but need to do it without losing resolution. Surprisingly, it is actually very simple to increase the size of your photos with Photoshop in just a few simple steps with almost no visible quality loss. For this tutorial, I will show how to do this. First, of course, you will need an image to work with.

Now, open the image you want to increase the size of. Then open the Actions palette. This technique works by gradually increasing the size of the image a bit at a time. For this reason, we are going to create an action that will handle the grunt work for us. This action will be saved and can be used later for any images you want to enlarge.

Go to the Actions palette, and down at the bottom click on the Create new action button. The settings you need to use for the new action are Upscale 10%, Default Actions, None, and None. Once you've done this, click on the record button.

Our new action has begun to record our changes, so we will now begin by increasing the size of the image one time, by going to Image > Image Size. Let's say that my image is only 8.889 wide by 6.667; I want it to be 10x8. In order to reduce quality loss, we will only be increasing the size 10 % at a time. Go to the document size within this window, and change from inches to percent. Now simply increase the size to 110%. Also, before closing this window, you will want to make sure the Resample image is set to Bicubic Smoother. Then click OK button.

If you look at the image, it will still be hard to notice any quality loss, even though the image size has been increased by a small amount. Go back to the Actions palette and click the stop button at the bottom. We have recorded our action. Now simply go to the new Upscale 10% action you will see listed, and repeat this process above by playing the action. Do this as often as needed, and then crop off any excess.