Can I keep my pictures sharp
at any size?
FACES . EXPRESSIONS . SYMBOLS . ICONS
DRAWING . TOUCHSCREEN PAINTING ON iPAD, iPHONE OR GALAXY NOTE
Looking Sharp
If you want a picture that's really sharp at any size it's a case of draw-it-yourself - in a vector drawing app.
Vector drawings are re-created every time they are displayed, with automatic antialiasing otherwise known as smoothing.
Adobe Ideas for iPad is a good example of a vector based drawing app. Trouble is, drawings in Ideas can appear too sharp. Adobe Ideas does not allow you to turn the antialiasing off.
Photos are bitmaps, which doggedly lay down pixels row by row in a mosaic of many colours, without so many fancy mathematics. The more pixels in a bitmap, the sharper and more detailed the effect. (Providing, of course, that the photo is in focus in the first place!)
A megapixel being a million pixels, it's hardly surprising that this megapixel dependency makes very large files.
Reducing the size at which an image is shown can make it look sharper. In the early days of camera phone photography, when those photos were as yet pretty thin in the pixel department, their appearance could be sharpened up by being displayed at half size.
What if you want to double the size of a photo
and keep it sharp?
You may be able to get away with increasing the display size of an image until the individual pixels start to show.
If you zoom up a tiny image like the smallest icon here, 16 x 16 = 256 pixels, you will see the individual pixels display as a mosaic of squares. You can see the pixels even in the 'large' (32 x 32) icon here. You have probably seen the same blocky effect emerging in photos blown up too far beyond their original size.
Increasing the display size is not of course increasing the number of pixels. There are three ways to measure digital image size. To put it in a nutshell: in pixels, inches or bytes.
To keep your pictures as sharp as possible when increasing the pixel count of bitmap graphics or photos, try this in Photoshop:
Go to Image Size and choose Bicubic (Best for smoothing).
Choose to increase in percentages and do it in small steps, only 10% at a time.
Take a good look at each step to see if you can risk continuing.
Save your new version with a new name.
It's a good idea to save your original as a Photoshop .psd file as well. Your camera or phone may well have created it as a .jpg. A .jpg file loses quality and sharpness every time you save it, regardless of whether you size it up or down.
Can I keep my pictures sharp
at any size?
SYMBOL DRAWING a skill you never lose
DIGITAL DRAWING AND PAINTING
GIF or JPEG . Draw or Paint . Keep enlarged pictures sharp
DIGITAL DOODLING THEN AND NOW
Palms . Pocket PC. First camera phone
(c) Valerie Beeby 1998 - 2012
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