Stretching Images

[Jimkirk363]

Whats the best and easiest way and best program to use to stretch an image with as little distortion as possible?

 

Thanks

[AbydosOne]

12 minutes ago, jimkirk363 said:

Whats the best and easiest way and best program to use to stretch an image with as little distortion as possible?

 

Thanks

Stretching implies distortion, does it not?

 

What are you trying to do? What are you trying to avoid?

[Jimkirk363]

Im attempting to resize an old picture to a size where i can use it as a wallpaper for PC without so much distortion.

[AbydosOne]

1 minute ago, jimkirk363 said:

Im attempting to resize an old picture to a size where i can use it as a wallpaper for PC without so much distortion loss of clarity.

There's no real good way to enlarge images without getting a loss of clarity (or pixelation), at least without taking effort on the user's side. Programs like GIMP (free) and Photoshop (definitely not free) will can resize images with Bilinear/Bicubic/etc. (as opposed to nearest-neighbor) resampling, but that doesn't increase the resolution of the resulting image, it just smooths out the pixelation. If the information isn't there, there's no magic that can be done in software to go find it. For photos, the effect is usually tolerable at reasonable scale factors, but graphics don't scale well at all (geometric lines mess with the smoothing algorithms).

 

As a thought: If it's a public image, you could try running it through Google Image Search (or others) and see if there's a larger version available?

[Jimkirk363]

Its a personal family photo of a loved one whos died.

[LyondellBasell]

12 hours ago, jimkirk363 said:

Its a personal family photo of a loved one whos died.

Is the photo a scan from film? If so, you have the option of having the original photo (or ideally, the original negative) rescanned at a higher resolution .

 

If not, maybe you could find other photos of the same family member and make a collage of your favorite moments.

Worst case, you may be able to extend the canvas in photoshop and use content aware fill to increase the overall size of the image. It won't "enlarge" it so much as it will simply help fill your screen, but it will save the remaining detail in the image.

 

Unfortunately it's still hard to "invent" detail when you enlarge photos. The best you can get might be to use an enlargement algorithm (bilinear/bicubic/etc as mentioned above), and then run a sharpening adjustment layer on top of that to attempt to pull some detail out of the lines.

[gator81]

One of the things I have heard others doing to enlarge a photo is to set it up an with good lighting and take another photo of the photo. Do it in RAW and highest res you can. At this point you may be able to use software to smooth it out and resize it to what you want will lesser problems. It will not be perfect but it may give you another option to  work with for what you want.