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RDrebsky6868

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 2, 2005
17
0
I received a picture from a friend on my phone is was a small picture that he took with his camera phone and sent it to me. I downloaded image converter but that usually only helps in downsizing the jpeg. I wasnt able to make the picture larger and keep a good resolution. I see Quark has a feature that allows reasising of JPEG with good resolution but thats too exspensive a program just to look at one photo. I was wondering if there are any o0ther ways to increase the size of this JPEG I have and to auto correct like on quark the resolution so I can see the fine details of the picture.
 

CanadaRAM

macrumors G5
RDrebsky6868 said:
I received a picture from a friend on my phone is was a small picture that he took with his camera phone and sent it to me. I downloaded image converter but that usually only helps in downsizing the jpeg. I wasnt able to make the picture larger and keep a good resolution. I see Quark has a feature that allows reasising of JPEG with good resolution but thats too exspensive a program just to look at one photo. I was wondering if there are any o0ther ways to increase the size of this JPEG I have and to auto correct like on quark the resolution so I can see the fine details of the picture.
Short answer: There isn't any.
You can never get detail back once it has been thrown away. The best you can do is "interpolation" where the progam mathematically "guesses" what colour to put in the empty spaces when you spread the original pixels out.

Most graphics programs will do this, Photoshop or Photoshop ELements is the most popular. Graphic Convertor is as good as any. There are some specialized programs that use fractal mathmatics to do better "guessing" but these are out of your price range.
 

~Shard~

macrumors P6
Jun 4, 2003
18,377
48
1123.6536.5321
Yep, Canada RAM is right. It's the hard and fast rule with compression - you cannot gain back what has been compressed. Same goes with MP3s - audio quality cannot be recovered from an MP3 file, nor can raw DV be recovered from an MPEG file. Unfortunately, that's just the way it is...
 

mkrishnan

Moderator emeritus
Jan 9, 2004
29,776
15
Grand Rapids, MI, USA
What the others said is completely correct, but you might be able to "enhance" the image somewhat by creating a larger (interpolated) version of the image, and using a tool along the lines of Unsharpen Mask in Photoshop. I believe that GIMP, which is free, has a very similar tool (I know it has the ability to interpolate a larger bitmap and to sharpen, I'm not 100% familiar with what sharpening tools it has).
 
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