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question about blowing up a small res image


E

egosbar

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i was just wondering about small images to blow up

if i had a small image and took a photo of it at 5 x7 with a very good camera using raw , can i then blow that up to poster size or will it still pixelatte?

reason being is my son in law had a 4 x 6 poor image blown up to about 18 x 18 inches on canvas and its perfect , the photo was only a snap off a iphone and was pretty bad but it turned out very very good

anyone print on canvas , how much would i need to spend to print say the standard square i guess its about
18 x 18
 
"A very good camera" -meaning how many Megapixels? I have a 6 Megapixel Nikon D40 and I get good output from my printer. Six Megapixel camera will deliver an image that is 2000 x 3008 or vice versa in landscape orientation. That will yield you an image 6.66 inches wide and 10.02 inches high at 300ppi. You could probably drop it to about 200-240 and still get a good printed image at that dpi. Now, if you have a camera that shoots at 12 MP then you can of course get bigger. I'm not saying that's the limit, but if you stretch it by re-sampling bigger, you are going to get more pixelation. It also depends at what distance the image is going to be viewed from as to how the quality will be perceived by one's eye.

To answer your question about taking a photo of it, that can be done, but I am thinking the result is not going to be a lot better than the original. Do you have a copy stand? They used to do this with film cameras and it will work with digital, but I suspect the scanner probably has made this practice obsolete.
 
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its going to be interesting to learn , im pretty interested in canvas printing i know my old man has a very good printer , hes a photographer and prints large images poster size

im not sure if he can print to canvas, ill talk too him soon ,he will know ,be interesting to find out ive just got the perfect resize program , looks like it might do what i want

the images will be viewed from about 10-20 foot so i understand it can be a little pixellated and still look good
 
Copying an image, whether it is done by scanning or re-photographing a print or transparency can not possibly increase the resolution of the image. Each such step can only decrease the resolution and gamut of the image.

However, once you have the image in digital format, you can do many things to the image that can't be done to the physical print / transparency, and some of these can give a better / more acceptable visual appearance. I would put printing to canvas in this category. Even if the image itself is soft, the viewers' eyes focus on the texture of the canvas, and this fools the brain into thinking the image is sharper than it really is.

Tom M

PS - BTW, I have made many prints on canvas and, almost always, they evoke the same response you had. I tend to use:
https://finerworks.com/pricing.asp

...but I know that Mpix and all of the other big mail-order printers also offer canvas.
 
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i think you'll find that when a relatively small image, such as the one you describe, is blown up and printed, though it will pixelate you'll tend to not notice this
1. the texture of the print surface, especially canvas, is going to eliminate some of the more noticeable pixelation
& 2. you tend to look at the image from a further distance, from where the pixelation is once again made un-noticeable
 
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