Have you ever had a picture that was great but when you added it to a print project or newsletter and you saw it again it was all pixilated and wrecked?
Well this is the perfect solution. Perfection does not get much better and simpler then this, I put it here under “advanced” as we have software scripts but it is just as easy for the layman Photoshoper to do manually as well.
Say you have a picture you took that that is fantastic for a cover A5 or even A4, or a poster but it is only a few hundred kb file so you say, I need a better 8 MP camera or I’ll never amount to any good printing quality pics. Not any more, all you need is STEP 10%!
The great guys over at NoBs introduced me to this magic potion tool and it really worked. I had a great picture once that I wanted to add to a Internet photo contest but they had a size limit that my good pic fell short of, thankfully I know about this trick so I just stepped it twice this way till it got up to the size without losing quality and they accepted it.
While planning to introduce this technique we did our own test for GOT, I knew it works for me but before I give it to our readers I really wanted to be convinced and run it through an ardent watertight test. I took a 2mp image that was only 752 kb and dimensions 1232×1632, with a print size of only 5×7 inch (13x18cm) it had great detail but handicapped for size, or not? Was it trapped to remain locked to the size of a average photo print forever? Check out these facts for yourself.
To make the test even harder we used just a detail of the small image, about 30%, and took it 10% steps ten times. to compare we took the same image and did it deliberately the wrong way and just made the image from 100% to 200% in one jump and this is the difference. Not only in retaining quality but the file is clearer and larger dimensions enabling use for a large size print job, like if there ever was a need for a donkey dental ad.
Quality test
File size test
Not only does it make your image better, but the image is nearly 20% larger then the original making it much more versatile for projects. These three pictures are scaled down proportionally.
There will probably be few times you need an image more then a few steps bigger so 10 times is really the edge, or is it? We ran it twice or 20×10% and ended up with an image nearly 40 inches or one meter on the longest size, (that’s a big image!) and it had still pretty sharp detail. Ten times should be more then enough for most any print job, and then some.
This is not a fix all, if your image is junky, it will just magnify the junk!
To make it easier for you all we made a script action for PS (CS2 or higher, older versions not sure, but you can let us know) just download and import it into your “Photoshop actions” folder in your Photoshop program files.
This will take your image 20 times at 5% increments, our programmer thought it would be better, but really not much of a difference, and you can then “undo” a few if you want it less times, or make your own action yourself, but that should help you get started to great picture enlargements the right way.
To do just one time and see what it is like just go to image size and instead of cm or inches select “percent” and add 10 to the 100% and “OK”, and do again as many times as you like/need.
Hi there,
Where can I find STEP 10%?
Kari, you will notice there is a link in blue saying “download action” it takes you to a DA page were you can click “download” and have the action for Photoshop CS2 and above.