Poking around in my late wife's iPhone4, I discovered a copy of the first photo I had of her. I used it as my desktop wallpaper for years, then lost it in a computer crash. I have no idea how this image got onto her phone, since the photo was taken years before we got her the iPhone. Nonetheless, I was overjoyed to find it, so I e-mailed it to myself. Problem: it's TINY! Like 59x90 pixels tiny. So I'm on the hunt for a freeware image utility that can enlarge JPEG images and do a half decent job of smoothing out the pixellation. I've tried Faststone -- marginal. I tried the image enlarger in Windows Power Toys -- that didn't work at all. Does anyone know of a good one?
On1 Photo isn't free, but there's a 14 day free trial. It features smart enlargement for making large scale posters. I believe if the content is right, they can go as much as 10x without wrecking the image with pixelation. I have to mention I sense a moving story behind your first paragraph.
Honestly, you're not going to get any kind of usable result if the source image is 59x90. Are you sure there isn't a larger version of the image on the phone? Perhaps you accidently emailed yourself the thumbnail instead of the actual image.
True, you're not going to get a wall mural out of a 59x90 image, but you might get 120x180. Check out ON1 Resize, a stand-alone product for making enlargements. Their claim of 1000% enlargements is probably not unattainable - https://www.on1.com/products/resize . There is a 14 day free trial, and it works on both Mac and Windows systems. I assume they mean 1000% by area, not 10x on each axis, so stretching each axis by a little over 333% is what I think they mean by 1000%. Photo content means everything, I'm sure. The software has to invent pixels. It probably works great on natural things, like people and landscapes. Getting readable text from a picture of a sign when the original pixels aren't there is probably a different matter. ON1 Photo worked great for me. Fantastic product. Affinity Photo is generally easier for what I want to do and integrated with their Publisher and Designer applications. Many great software applications these days.
I keep forgetting Affinity Photo. I bought it, but I haven't needed it so I haven't installed it. Does it do good quality image enlargement?
Actually, yes, Affinity Photo is reasonably awesome at enlarging. Open a picture and do any initial tuning you need. Click the "Develop" button in the upper left. The main menu will change. Go to Document->Resize document. Bump the size. The lock icon indicates the aspect ratio will be maintained. There are several resampling algorithms. I'd say try one, export it, and close the photo without saving it. Reopen it and try another. I believe the resample option should be checked. Click the Resize button. You won't see any change, but the document will now be a lot larger. Next, go to the export persona and export a png or jpeg. You can also resize up in the export, but I am not sure about control over resampling. Please work on a copy of your original. If that doesn't seem to work, I'll watch for posts here or forum messages to me. I need to stay more current on what's possible with Affinity Photo, so I appreciate the chance. By the way, an iPad in Sidecar mode makes for a great digitizer. With Apple Pencil, it's scary how fast even a klutz like me can create an accurate mask.
You can get pills for that... no wait Joking aside , the problem will be the tiny amount of data in the existing image, when you blow up an image in any kind of photo editor there are two basic options i) straight forward enlargement essentially this just moves the dots further apart... not a problem if you have way more dots/pixels than the eye can perceive, but with 59 x90 that's not really an option ii) Interpolation... this basically uses an algorithm to insert pixels between the existing ones based on their colour... the better software uses more complicated algo's which can detect edges etc... the problem is with 59x90 there's not much source information to base off so the results are likely to become worse the larger you go (because more pixels are being inserted).. you generally get better results going up a small amount at a time rather than in one big step, but there's a realistic limit particularly for people where detail is less forgiving than it is in say landscape The other issue is that onscreen view is generally more forgiving of low pixel density than print... if you want a file you can print to frame you are probably out of luck, a 4x6 print at 200dpi which is the lowest realistic setting would need 800x1200 which you're not going to interpolate to without quality loss. The other thing worth looking at is whether you can email it yourself from the phone at a larger file size
If you want, I can enlarge it with some special process. No need to buy software that you will use once. I am good at these things. If you want, of course. I'd like to help to save a precious picture. I wish I had some from my childhood but my father threw them away when he was "cleaning". I should probably just message you. It seems someone is constantly deleting my posts. I wonder how long will this one last.
Haha, I messaged SapereAude but he actually forgot about this post and thought one of us lost his mind. But we sorted it out and I sent him the AI improved version. We will see how he likes it. It is the best today's process can do and I've got good 2000x3000 pixels out of the little size.
And I received a greatly enlarged copy of the photo that's ... not terrible. At full resolution it's obvious that the software was doing a lot of faking but zoomed out a bit and viewed from a short distance it's not bad. MUCH better than the tiny image I had.
