If you’re a photographer or editor, you’ll know just how important image quality is to your work. The good news is that you can breathe new life into flat photos with a few simple tweaks.
If you’re looking to make your photos HD, you’ve come to the right place. In this guide, we’ll show you a few easy ways to change the resolution of an image, and improve photo quality in the process.
What you’ll learn:
How can altering resolution increase image quality?
Can you increase the image quality of a low-resolution photo?
How resampling and interpolation can change the resolution of an image.
How to increase resolution of an image in Photoshop.
Lightroom, Photoshop and other software: which is best to improve photo quality?
In digital photography, image resolution ties directly to image quality. Key to this are ‘pixels’.
Pixels are the building blocks of digital photos and other raster image files. Each of these tiny blocks contains detail and information for your image. Generally speaking, higher pixels density increases the resolution of an image.
Digital image resolution is normally measured as PPI – or pixels per inch. Hence, a greater PPI value can bring about a more quality image.
Picture a familiar scene from the movies: a detective asks a tech-savvy police staffer to “enhance” a blurry image on a computer, until it becomes clear enough to make out a key piece of the puzzle.
But can you really make an image higher resolution in real life? Actually, the answer is yes — though it sometimes takes more than a few clicks.
The only way to resize a smaller photo into a larger, high-resolution image without highlighting poor image quality, is to take a new photograph or re-scan your image at a higher resolution.
You can increase the resolution of a digital image file, but you will lose image quality by doing so. Why? Because the number of pixels on your photo is generally fixed by your camera. While you can increase image size (and even add pixels) using editing software, you’ll often find the image becomes grainier.
However, there are some measures you can take in Adobe Photoshop to help you increase resolution while upholding visual quality.
Resampling images in Photoshop means changing their resolutions by adding or subtracting pixels.
When looking to make an image higher resolution, there are two main resampling methods:
When you increase the number of pixels in an image without adjusting the dimensions, you are adding more pixels into the same amount of space and increasing the resolution (or amount of detail) held within each inch.
However, upsampling doesn’t increase the detail or depth of an image. Instead, it’s generally used to smooth over pixelation of very low-res images. If you’re looking to get a great quality image with light, shade, depth and detail, you’ll need a high megapixel camera first.
Discover how to measure it, change it and more with our complete guide.
Removing data is preferable to adding it, since Photoshop will have to guess at how any newly added pixels should look. As a result, upsampling doesn’t often result in a better-quality image.
The interpolation method can help. This is how Photoshop chooses the colour values of new pixels.
Choosing the correct interpolation method can help avoid unwanted pixelation:
When you’re done resampling, applying the Unsharp Mask filter can help enhance image quality.
There are plenty of reasons why you might want to convert an image to high resolution.
You may be looking to enhance a lower-resolution photo to print it. For example, a high-resolution TIFF file is a better printing format than a low-resolution JPEG.
If you are open to different image sizes, first try changing the dimensions and resolution of your photo without resampling it. For example, you could potentially crop your image and focus on an individual detail to get a better-quality result.
This means working with what you have, not adding new data to the original image. You can always resample as necessary after you’ve tried adjusting dimensions and resolution separately.
In this way, Photoshop can act as something of an image resolution enhancer.
See if you can increase image quality for print by adjusting only the dimension or resolution, without changing pixel count.
Photoshop will automatically change the other value for you, keeping the aspect ratio and amount of pixels the same.
Follow these steps.
If you have specific needs for the dimensions or size of your image — like a poster at a certain print size — check the box for Resample.
This allows you to adjust the print size and change the image resolution independently, which changes the number of pixels in the image. Get started with these steps.
There are ways to make your image look clearer and appear more high-resolution without actually adding pixels or changing the dimensions.
Attempting these methods can help get the highest quality you can out of the digital information you have in your image.
Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop are both industry standards for image editing. But you might find other Adobe tools suit you better.
Here are a few options for changing the resolution of your image, and other useful digital photography tasks.
You can resize, retouch and increase the resolution of your images for free using Adobe Express. Use our user-friendly platform to resize images in a flash. You can also access Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and more using a free trial.
You can change the resolution of a JPEG image using a range of Adobe products, including Photoshop and Lightroom. Simply go to File>Export, then toggle your image resolution higher / lower – or simply click ‘optimise for web’.
You can enhance image quality using Adobe Photoshop in a number of ways. Resample and interpolate to increase pixel levels, or change print dimensions to strike the right balance without altering the original image. You can also mix up contrast, vibrancy and saturation to improve colour.