Making a hi-res image from a lo-res file
Here’s a PhotoShop tip you probably won’t find in any reference book. It seemed to be a big hit at a recent Basic PhotoShop seminar in Pinckneyville.
Everyone has dealt with digital images that were too small or too low in resolution for reproduction in the newspaper. Think: Obituary mug shots off funeral websites or e-mailed photos from the community.
If it’s a website photo, view the image as large as you can on your screen. Most browsers have an enlarging method designed to help people with poor eyesight read the screen. On the Mac, it’s the “command” key (squiggly key if you don’t know what the command key is) plus the “plus” key. This shortcut will work with a variety of applications.
If you can connect to a large screen, that might help. Don’t blow it up so big that it starts to pixelate. Generally, an image viewed on the screen like this will be smoother than if it’s blown up in PhotoShop. That’s because the screen image is designed to give you the best view while PhotoShop is designed to give you an accurate view based on the resolution.
Now, take a screen shot of the image. On a Mac, that’s the “command” key plus the “3” key. David Brancecum of the Randolph County Herald Tribune in Chester pointed out that the “command” plus “4” key combination will give you crosshairs that you can then drag over the picture to capture just the image.
The image is now saved on your hard drive, probably on your desktop. It should have a filename of “Picture 1” if this is the first time you’ve used the screen shot. That image can now be opened in PhotoShop and edited. It will still be a low resolution, but it should be a larger image, so you can adjust the size and resolution for a mug shot.
If it is still showing jagged edges, Lonnie Hinton of The Vienna Times pointed out that you can use the “Gaussian blur” filter in PhotoShop to minimize that. In some photos, you can also try using the “blur” tool and adjust the amount of blur in the window at the top of the PhotoShop page. Using the blur tool, you can hit the jagged edges without blurring the whole image.
If you’re really desperate, you can try this. Change the screen resolution on your monitor to make the image view larger. A screen shot now will not result in a larger file than before because the screen shot is proportional to the monitor’s resolution. Instead, take your camera and shoot a photo of the screen.
If you have some redneck fixes of your own, send them to
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and we’ll share them with the world.
Yep, you heard me. I’ve done this and it works. The newer flat screen monitors have such high definition that you can take a photo of them without getting that dark horizontal line that TVs used to produce on camera.
Heck, I’ve even done this with my cell phone and got decent results. In the Summer edition of PressLines, there are a couple of obituary mug shots that were taken with a cell phone camera from a newspaper print copy. By shooting a newspaper with a camera instead of scanning it, you can generally avoid the annoying moiré pattern that often appears. When you get your copy of PressLines, see if you can tell which images were shot with a cell phone.
Granted, these are unconventional fixes. You might even call them redneck approaches. But they work, and isn’t that what matters?
If you have some redneck fixes of your own, send them to
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
and we’ll share them with the world.
David Porter is communications & marketing director for the Illinois Press Association. |
