Speaking of pictures....

[poltr1]

Does anyone know of photo enlargement software that can faithfully enlarge 640x480 photos to 1280x960? Or software that can fix damaged digital photos?

I have a set of photos that I took with my camcorder. The maximum resolution on the camcorder for still pictures is 640x480. I'd like to enlarge these to 1280x960 for printing. I can print them now, but unless they're wallet-sized, they'd look horrible.

I have another set of photos that got damaged due to a disk hiccup. It looks like the photographs are missing a pixel or two, and the color information changed after that missing pixel. That's about the best way I can describe it.

Comments

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

I use ImageMagick for resizing. I've only ever used it for reducing images from whatever my camera's native resolution is to something appropriate for a webpage, but IIRC it'll work to enlarge, too.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

I'll look at home; I have a good program, but its name escapes me. Give me a few hours.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Got it. It's BenVista's PhotoZoom Pro 2 (which used to be called S-Spline, the name of its primary algorithm).

Recommended, but neither free (though there is a free trial which produces watermarked versions) nor shareware.

[poltr1]

Roger that. When I Googled for "photo enlargement software", PhotoZoom Pro 2 was at or near the top of the list. Looks interesting, but $189? Oy!

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

It's worth noting that while you can do any sort of resizing you want, you cannot *add* resolution to a photo. If you resize a 640x480 image to 1280x960, you've only increased the dimensions, but it's still a 640x480 resolution image.

That said, I use Photoshop on my Windows box, and Gimp on Linux.

[tollermom]

What autographedcat said... you can't add data that isn't there. Some programs are better than others at interpolating the missing pixels, but the result is going to be, at best, soft focused and, at worst, obviously jaggy.

On the plus side, almost all software is better at doing that pixel-creation than doing it w/ the print driver, so you'll get somewhat better results than just printing them as they are.

And all that said... I use Photoshop and if you want to email me one of the images, I'll resize them for you so you can see if the results are going to be satisfactory. I also followed the link to PhotoZoom that redaxe mentioned, and it looks like they have a consumer photo package that includes the resizing capability for only $59, which doesn't sound like a bad deal (it has a free trial version too, so you can test the quality before paying).