I took a Picture with my Canon XSI of the Golden Gate Bridge, but when I went to go have it enlarged, it looked horrible! How can I fix this?! Thank you!
The answer would depend on several factors. Did you capture the image at the full 12 megapixels? How large did you try to print it? You should have been able to print a a 8x10 or 16x20 without too much trouble at that resolution. If you exported a smaller jpg and went to print it at a store I can see how that may have been problematic. What was you process for editing, export, printing? The image is going top have a set number of pixels, the print size and DPI are directly in correlation. For instance 12.1 megapixels is 4256 x 2848 pixels or at 300DPI resolution 9.5x 14.2 inches. You can resize it in the image editor to be other sizes, if you retain the pixels a 14 x 21 inch resize would be about 200 DPI. So there will be less pixels the larger you go.
Back in the early days of DSLRs with small sensors, the Sports Photography group I worked with would get amazingly nice quality poster sized prints from 3Mpxl images from a local camera shop that used a program called Real Fractals that heavily processed the image before printing it.
If that was Genuine Fractals, I tried the demo version and thought it was awful! I've had better luck just resizing up slightly with Photoshop or Gimp.
I think you're right, it was probably Genuine Fractals. I'm guessing the guys at the camera shop knew the best way to optimize it for their printer to get great results because I saw something like a 16x24 poster that was amazingly good for being a 3 Mpxl image.
One of my carry-everywhere cameras is an old hand-me-down Kodak DX4530 which is 5 megapixels. I was able to do a fairly decent 13x19 print from it by just sizing it properly in Gimp and feeding it to the printer in the exact resolutions and dimensions I wanted. I've found that one trick to getting good larger prints is to size things EXACTLY to the print size wanted, exact dimensions at 300ppi.
You can try with On1 Resize 10.5. I didn't used it, but you can download a trial, and see the result. https://www.on1.com/products/resize10/ What I use, but only for enlargements not bigger than 200-250% is the program I use for basic procesing and viewing, Faststone. Is fast and FREE.
or you could take several pictures zoomed in closer then stitch them together for a super huge, though i wouldn't go for 1:1 tried that with a road map once...............
I too have found pushing an image past 200% is a bad idea. And a good way to do this is increase pixels in the file exported for printing to be the dimensions you want at 300 DPI for printing so you are sending the printer optimal information. The larger issue her is no matter if you use a fancy program designed to increase the image or just Photoshop or Gimp to increase the pixels, you are creating information that did not exist so do not expect miracles.
Just like pro sports coaches that constantly state the obvious by emphasis on the basics, when an image is enlarged by oversampling (i.e. heavily cropping or increasing it's size to 200% or more), the loss of image details will soften it's appearance and requires carefully applied additional sharpening that avoids exaggerating image artifacts and noise while "compensating" for structural loss of detail. Also, generally speaking, when viewing a greatly enlarged image it's usually assumed the image is to be viewed from a farther away distance than when you're viewing a handheld 4x6 print or you'll likely never be satisfied..
