How can I enlarge a photo without degridation?

Question

I have a picture that is 160 x 120 and I want it to be large enough to use as a wallpaper without looking like garbage.

I have tried enlarging and stretching, to no avail.

Answer 1

If you have photoshop, hit it with a gaussean blur (under "filters"). Try blurring by 1 pixel, then go from there.

You can increase the ppi along with the actual image size but it doesn't do much good and probably makes it worse.

Answer 2

If you have an existing photo (what size unit are you refering to?) scan it in at as high a resolution you can. If you are referring to an digital image: You cannot add resolution to an existing digital image. Ever. Photoshop can give you more pixels, but it does it by interpolating between neighboring pixels and it cannot add detail which didn't exist in the image in the first place. You have to have an image which will print at 100-150dpi when it's at the size you want to have it. If your image doesn't have that many pixels it's going to look crappy, no matter what. By the way, never save an image as jpg if you want to keep high resolution and detail. Use tif.
Before you get disappointed also look into prices for printing large images. Once you figure out how many hundred $ you project is going to cost you, you may lose interest anyway.

You could make a new image by using your old one as a guide to paint your wall and make your own wall painting.

Answer 3

Boost the ppi (pixels per inch), then increase the size, preferably with photoshop. If that doesn't work, the photo is just poor quality and nothing will work. If that's the case, try and find the original.

Answer 4

I've never heard of anyone wanting to enlarge a picture to use as Wallpaper before. There is like no way to do that. Why don't you consider tiling it. Put it into MY PIctures and look at it on your monitor screen tiled.........................

Answer 5

You can use photoshop and add the resolution

Answer 6

Hmm... I am not too sure!