Photoshop resizing has me baffled. .?

Question

I purchased an image to put on a poster. My poster is 22x28 inches. I used the help resize image to resize the picture to 20 inches wide (keep proportions) so it would give me a margin. When I drag it over it's way bigger than my poster. It seems the smaller I get -- the bigger it gets. I HAVE READ THE BOOK AND taken a tutorial AND read Photoshop for dummies but I must be dumber than the dummies lol.

Answer 1

So you are dragging an image from one document into another document, correct? It sounds like the problem has to do with resolution. I would think that the resolution of the image you want on the poster is higher than the resolution of the document you're dragging it to. To fix this, change the resolution of your new, blank document before you drag the image into it. Go to Image > Image Size, and under "Document Size" on that popup is where you will find the resolution setting. Do NOT change the resolution on the image you want to be on the poster - doing this could negatively effect the quality. Just make sure the resolution of the new document is the same as that of the image, and it should work better.

Answer 2

You won't be able to such an enlargement. Even the specialty enlargement plug ins, like Genuine Fractals, would not be able to do that sort of enlargement. In general you cannot take a raster image whether from your digital camera, created from scratch in Photoshop or any other raster (pixel-based) program and make it larger. There is only so much data in the image, and even the best ways of enlarging pixel-based images are only making a best guess at where to fill in missing data. General rule is you have to start out with a big image, which you can shrink down, but not enlarge (you can always delete/remove data, but you can't add in what isn't there, which is what you are trying to do. It looks nasty because all you are doing is making the pixels bigger.) What you need to do is create that banner picture in Illustrator, which is vector based. Because vector programs are using lines, points, and curves, and work with mathematical calculations (which the computer does), they can be enlarged almost infinitely (it's called scalability). You can take your banner and place it in Illustrator as a template and hand trace it, or if it's not too complicated, uses flat color and strong contrast, you can try using Live Trace in Illustrator, which will turn the image into vectors. However, Live Trace tends to be rather tricky to use. Other than that, there really isn't any good way to make something that small into anything nearly the size you need.

Answer 3

You have to make sure the DPI of both is the same. Standard screen DPI is 72 (96 for higher res monitors) and print images tend to be 150 - 300 so that it's crisper when it's printed on paper.

If you make sure in the poster image is at least 150 DPI (and should be CMYK if you're printing it too) via the Image Resize tool, then make sure the image you're dragging into the poster image is the same DPI.

If you need more detailed help, let me know :)